The Coliseum

a novella by

Patrick Lestewka

Kindle Edition

Necro Publications

2011

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The COLISEUM © 2004 by Patrick Lestewka

Cover art © 2011 David G. Barnett

This digital edition March 2011 © Necro Publications

Book design & typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

Assistant editors:

Amanda Baird, John Everson, Jeff Funk, C. Dennis Moore

A Necro Publication

5139 Maxon Ter.

Sanford, FL 32771

www.necropublications.com

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I. ROLE CALL

The Beast

This is how it begins:

“We gotta ice him.”

“The Beast?”

“Yeah.”

“Your doc did a bang-up job. I can hardly notice them.”

“Notice what?”

“The lobotomy scars. ’Cause you must’ve lost your fuckin’ mind.”

Paulo Sorbetti and Joseph Menna sit in the Fulgate pen cafeteria eating off plastic TV-dinner trays. Paulo scoops a mouthful of baked beans onto a slice of bread, grimacing. He envisions himself in his mother’s kitchen, stuffing his face with three-cheese lasagna and veal cutlets smothered in tomato sauce, custard-filled cannoli for dessert. Doesn’t help.

“All shitting aside, Joe,” Paulo says. “The Beast—we’re talkin’ one hardcore brajone.”

Joseph Menna handles the drug trade in Fulgate. Acid, crystal meth, amphetamines, speed, crack, horse: he’ll hook you up. A high-ranking Capo in the Castiglio mob syndicate, Joseph is serving a dime for trafficking. The guy who ratted him turned state’s evidence after being nabbed with two keys of uncut coke. Joseph tracked the stoolie down and jammed a length of piano wire into his eyeball until it tickled gray matter, but not before the guy took the stand.

Still, it’s easy time: the well-greased guards have a habit of looking the other way when Joseph’s mistress visits with a bulging purse or duct-taped shoebox. He and Paulo have their own cell outside gen. pop, get anything they want—conjugal visits, booze, unlimited yard time—and with fellow Castiglio crew members serving time for crimes ranging from extortion to murder one, their ride promised to be a cushy one.

Until the Beast showed up.

“Okay,” Joseph pushes his tray away, “granted, he’s a mean sonofabitch—”

“Big, too. Never seen anyone so goddamn big.”

“Big, sure. A big fucking goomba. The fuck he think he is, gonna just waltz in, start screwing with business? Peddling that monkey-smack of his; shit’ll make you go blind.” Joseph frowns, lips sucked in, brow lowering, face crumpling inwards like a sheet of balled-up newsprint. “Anyone’s going blind in this place, it’s on my shit.”

His name is Harlan Ruddock, but he is known simply as the Beast. Thirty-seven years old, in and out of incarceration since fourteen. He possesses three N’s that have terrified the gambit of social workers, prison guards, teachers and victims he has run across, into, and over: Near-genius IQ. Nihilistic attitude. No conscience. Harlan didn’t follow the typical criminal arc, petty theft to fraud to armed robbery to manslaughter to murder. He saw the brass ring and grabbed it.

The first man he killed was Hector Sanchez, a dogshit dope peddler working Toronto’s seedy Church Street district. Harlan was seventeen at the time, fresh from a stint in Juvy. Even then his physical dimensions were awesome: Six-five, 300 pounds, legs thick around as trash cans and arms like fenceposts, a chest as wide as the horizon and a skull shaven smooth as an eight ball.

“How much a hit?” he’d asked Hector.

“Fifteen.”

“Ten, last time.”

“Inflation.”

“How ’bout give it for ten? Catch you even next time around; you got my word.”

Hector snorted. “Esse, nobody lasts long taking a dude at his fucking word.”

Harlan jammed his gloved hands into his jacket. His pockets were packed with all sorts of shit he should’ve thrown away: Crumpled strip-club flyers and lint-stuck chewing gum, a paperclip, a shred of paper with his parole officer’s phone number…

…a long, sharpened pencil.

Harlan’s breath plumed whitely. “Come on, bro, just this one time—”

“Told you already,” Hector said, squaring his body. “No…can…do. Now beat it, boy, before I lose my patience and do something stupid like kill your ass—”

Harlan’s arm, a flash of blue fabric, swept in a tight arc. Hector caught sight of the yellow shaft of a Mirado Classic #2 before Harlan buried it in the warm cavern of his ear. Hector’s eardrum exploded with the concussive decompression of a pimento sucked from an olive—sschluupp—his knees buckled and he crashed down on the dirty pavement. The pencil snapped deep inside his ear, head hammering off a Styrofoam Big Mac box, crushing it flat. Streaks of mustard and a withered pickle slice stuck to Hector’s greasy black hair. Blood spurted around the pencil in thin geysers, flecking Harlan’s face, his chest. Hector emitted a pitiful gobbling sound, an excited turkey. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed around the toe of Harlan’s Tek workboot. The Beast kicked Hector in the mouth, partly to shut him up and partly because he felt like it. A few minutes later Hector died.

Harlan rolled the body behind a dumpster and looted it for money and drugs. On the way home he tossed his bloody jacket and gloves in an oil drum fire. The police performed a token investigation; some dipshit smack-runner didn’t merit much attention in a city awash with baby-rapers and celebrity stalkers. Harlan ended up back in the slammer on a penny-ante burglary rap. That’s the way his life goes: He pulls light time for petty crimes, while—be it due to charisma, intelligence, intimidation, or simple good luck—he avoids taking the fall for serious offenses.

“So, what we gonna do?” Paulo says. “Have him gooned in the weight room? Cluster-fucked on the basketball court?”

Joe shakes his head. “Christ, no. Like you said, guy’s a monster. We try to bust him in gen. pop, who knows what goes down. We got what, ten crew men in here? Five are made guys; they ain’t gonna stick their necks out to ice the freak. Other five are a tough bunch, but…” Joe covers his mouth with his hand, talking through spread fingers. “I don’t think they’d take the big bastard down. Not without getting hurt.”

“Yeah, it could get…messy.”

“Messy. Right.”

The first thing Harlan did when he entered Fulgate was find out who controlled the drug routes. Forget cigarettes: Narcotics are the bighouse’s hard currency. Most prisons have an intricate network—smugglers, mixers, runners, and collectors. But Harlan cut out the middlemen by wearing many hats: Smuggler when a neighborhood girl brings the drugs to him in the lining of her baby’s diaper; mixer when cutting the street-grade junk with powdered cleaner lifted from the prison utility room; runner when selling his smack in the yard; collector when busting deadbeat’s elbows and divorcing teeth from welsher’s gums. Harlan knows he’s stepping on Joseph Menna’s toes. He just doesn’t give a shit.

Paulo says, “Who’s doing it?”

Joseph produces a squeeze bottle and a box of waterproof matches from his overalls. He uncaps the bottle and Paulo inhales the greasy odor of kerosene.

“We are.”

“What?”

“Us. We do it.”

“You nuts? We’re walkin up to the Beast and tellin’ him, Please hold still while we turn you into a roman-fuckin’-candle?”

“What, I’m a fucking lunatic all of a sudden?” Joseph says. “I got it set up with the guards. We walk right up to his cell and hose him down,” he jiggles the bottle, “then we light a match and poof—problem solved.”

“Why don’t you get one of the guys to pull it? We’ll hear the screams down the cellblock.”

“Remind me: When exactly did you grow a pussy? Come on, it’ll be like firebombing the gorilla cage at the zoo. Besides, this psycho’s been hurting business. Hurting our guys.”

A week ago, Harlan had been visited by two Castiglio goons. One currently occupies the prison infirmary with two broken arms and an ass that burns like a tire fire when he takes a shit. The other one occupies a mortician’s slab.

“I want to look into his eyes as he goes up,” Joseph says. “Watch him burn.”

The lockdown horn sounds. Convicts rise and return to their cells, an exodus of orange sackcloth. Joseph and Paulo remain. In ten minutes a guard appears in the doorway and nods.

Joseph says, “Let’s do it.”

Harlan sits on the edge of his bunk. The toothbrush—a purple Reach with angled neck and hard bristles—rests easily in his massive hand. He scrapes the handle over the cell’s cinderblock wall, a purple scar cutting across the unpainted brick; purple powder collecting at his feet. He melts the plastic at the head with a cigarette ember. He wants to stick and snap, leaving the weapon inside a neck or a belly or an armpit, something to be remembered by.

Two prisoners appear in front of his cell. Their bodies are pressed against the walkway railing, maintaining as much distance as possible between themselves and the bars. Harlan stands, bedsprings groaning, palming the sharpened toothbrush up his sleeve.

Although Joseph is smiling, his face is pale. “How’s it going, you piece of shit?”

“Fine, Joseph,” Harlan says. His child-like tone of voice is somehow horrific. “And you?”

“Better than you’re gonna be,” Paulo says, stepping from one foot to the next as if he might piss himself.

“Do we have an issue, gentlemen?”

“Yeah, we got an issue.” Joseph pulls the squeeze bottle. “A 300-pound psycho issue. A soon-to-be barbecued motherfucker issue.”

“I see.” Harlan’s movements are relaxed. “That’s a shame.”

His hand dips below the mattress.

Harlan has made a weapon on the sly in the prison metal shop: an interlocking series of copper pipes tipped with a sharpened sickle of sheet metal. Though only eight inches recoiled, it telescopes to six feet with a flick of the wrist.

This is how it ends:

Joseph sprays the cell with kerosene, wetting the bunk, the bookshelf, Harlan. He and Paulo are edging closer to the bars, their giddy demeanor that of children tormenting a caged dog. Harlan walks towards them.

“That’s right,” Joseph says. “Come feel the burn.”

Paulo trembles in anticipation. “Nobody fucks with the Castiglios. Nobo—”

Harlan’s hand flashes at the hip and the baling hook unfurls in a streak of liquid quicksilver. It passes between the bars and snaps to full extension somewhere behind Paulo’s skull. Paulo barely conceives the danger when Harlan yanks his arm in the manner of a trainer bringing a leashed dog to heel. The hook’s tip punches through the tendons of Paulo’s neck, exploding through the back of his mouth. It juts between his teeth like a blood-slicked metallic tongue as Paulo’s body jitterbugs like a boated fish, crepe-soled shoes beating a tattoo on the cement. All this happens in the span of seconds, in a heartbeat, a blink. The smell of kerosene is cloying and its greasy fumes shimmer the air.

Joseph fumbles for a matchstick as Paulo quakes and drains beside him.

Harlan reaches between the bars, grabbing a handful of Joseph’s overalls. The Castiglio honcho screams like a terrified infant, feet backpeddling uselessly, fingernails tearing bloodless gashes across his attacker’s hand. Harlan twines his arm around Joseph’s sparrow-thin neck and spins him around, pulling his quaking body against the bars.

“Sorry, Joe.” He drops the toothbrush-shank into a waiting palm. “Two’s a crowd.”

He drives the shiv between the cleft of Joseph Menna’s ass, twists, re-asserts his grip, and stabs again. Joseph gasps as if he’s immersed himself in an unexpectedly cold bath. Harlan’s arm pistons with the steady rhythm of a sewing machine. Crimson rosettes bloom on the seat of Menna’s overalls and dark blood patters to the floor. Harlan stabs over and over, ripping the hole deeper, until his fist disappears into the wound. Joseph’s big pink tongue falls out of his big pink mouth and the noises he is making are, for the most part, unintelligible. The guards can only stand, horrified, as blood spreads across cold gray concrete. The shiv snaps somewhere deep inside Menna’s lifeless body and Harlan drops everything.

“So,” he says to the ghost-faced guards, “What now?”

— | — | —

The Broken

This is how it begins:

“Albert, I have good news and bad news.”

Val Ristone, Albert Rose’s boss, is undoubtedly the fattest man in the continental United States. Al has seen pictures—Guinness World Book of Records black-and-whites, those freakish brothers on their mini-bikes—but not real-life, sitting in front of him, close enough to see the beading sweat and a head round and flat and pale as a wheel of mozzarella. Val somehow manages to smell fat: A combination of bacon grease and baby powder seeps out of the man’s fistulous pores.

“What seems to be the concern?”

“Albert, I won’t piss around: You’re fired.” Knitted together on the desktop, Val’s fingers resemble haphazardly-piled sausage links in a butchershop window. “Your bookwork’s fine; your nose for numbers has saved the company some decent coin. But you’re one antisocial son-of-a-bitch and truthfully—” Val, who has attended Tony Robbins’ Say It Like You Mean It seminar not once, but twice, prides himself on his no-BS attitude. “—you strike me as a guy who’s gonna snap and show up wearing a dynamite overcoat one day. No offense.”

Al’s body crumples like a collapsed lung. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think my social ski—”

“Hey,” Val raises his arms in mock-surrender, “what about last week? We throw a retirement bash for Patty Hersh and where the hell were you? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.”

“There was some pressing work I had to—”

“That’s right, you were bivouacked in your cubicle with your nose stuck in some file or another. Might as well be on Mars.”

“Mr. Ristone, I need this job. I’ve got…expenses.”

“Too late, shooter.” Val shakes his head, an executioner feigning contrition. His body sloshes around in its ill-fitting pinstriped suit, threatening to spill out like silicone from a busted implant. “A boat can’t move if every oar isn’t in the water.”

“I…I don’t even know what that means.”

“My hands are tied. Have your desk cleared by five.”

Rot in hell, you fat pile of shit! May Satan boil your fat ass down for candle wax!

Of course, Albert doesn’t say this. He thinks it, and much worse.

But what does he do?

“I disagree with your decision.”

Albert is halfway to the door when he asks, “What’s the good news?”

“Uh?”

“You said there was good news and bad news.”

“Uh, right.” Val shrugs. “Well, you get some free time. Collect your thoughts.”

It is short work to clear Albert’s spartan cubicle—a coffee mug with Hang In There, Baby! stenciled in blue cursive, a travelling alarm clock, a framed photograph of his wife…

…oh, God. His wife.

Pamela Badenhorst-Rose is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Her childhood was an endless cavalcade of polo tourneys and garden parties, high teas and opera galas. Expensive upbringings breed expensive tastes. They met at a midtown bar, the type of joint where beer is sold by the tray and tabletop-dancing is encouraged. She was slumming it; Al had been dragged out by work cronies. It wasn’t a case of their eyes locking across the dance floor: Pamela did not swoon rapturously, Albert did not sweep her off her feet for a night of torrid lovemaking.

He spilled a drink on her. A banana daiquiri.

She called him an oaf, a clod, a moron. He apologized profusely. She wasn’t an attractive woman: Her features appeared to have been chipped from unforgiving flint, a long and regal nose according her face the rough aspect of a lawn dart. A lean angular frame, a pair of token nubs poking through an angora sweater, legs like menthol cigarettes matching the coolness of her personality. Albert was mesmerized.

Pamela had finally found a man willing to grovel, to cower, to fulfill her every whim and who had no idea of her background. His supplication was genuine and not an attempt to grease the wheels for the Badenhorst fortune. Albert, meanwhile, had found a woman who licked the internal wound in him that called out to be dominated, fed the fire of his inferiority.

But she really, really loves me. Loves me for who I am.

And, in her way, Pamela does love Albert. Loves him the way a hound-trainer loves a Bluetick, the way a pimp loves a whore, the way an alcoholic loves the bottle. He gives her what she needs, provides a crucial service, scratches her nagging itch.

I don’t know what I’d do if she didn’t love me.

Al’s car is a rattletrap but he cannot afford a new one. Pamela manages the finances. She drives a ’98 Saab car and dresses in up-to-the-minute fashions and foots the bill for extravagant parties. Albert, meanwhile, drives a rust-bucket Dodge with torn upholstery and wears blazers with fraying elbow patches.

He pulls into the driveway of their three-story brownstone. The mortgage payments give Albert cold sweats but Pamela refused to live in anything less. His rusting Dodge shudders to a stop beside Pamela’s ice-blue Saab. The juxtaposition recalls a diamond set beside a dog turd.

This is how it ends:

“Honey?” Al’s voice trembles as he opens the door. “You home?”

Sound upstairs: Low moans, animal panting, odd cooing noises. From the bedroom.

“Pamela, dear?” Albert climbs the spiral staircase.

Outside the bedroom door: A single shoe. Buttery black leather. Male size eleven.

“Pamela…?”

The door opens to the sight of his wife’s bare back cresting above the sheets. Her body moves rhythmically, up and down and up and down again. She grunts like a delighted piglet. Albert can see sweat beading on her neck, beneath her tightly-bunned hair, and trickling between her sharp shoulder blades. He cannot see the man below her, the man fucking his wife, the man making her scream and buck and thrust more ardently than he’s ever been able to, the man whose manicured fingernails leave bloodless half-moons in the flesh of her waist and ass. He crosses to the closet.

“Albert!”

Pamela stares at her husband while a-straddle the other man. She does not scream and cover herself; her face does not redden in a blush. There is a moist sound as their bodies disengage.

“Al–bert.” Pamela’s tone is one might employ to chastise a puppy. “Wait outside. We’ll talk about this later.”

“In a moment, dear.”

Albert does not know why he bought the shotgun. It wasn’t an impulse buy. He debated the purchase for weeks. He didn’t hunt or shoot skeet, but still he wanted—

…needed it…

—siphoning money out of their mutual account over time so Pamela wouldn’t notice. A Van Doekken Longbore with a walnut stock, titanium-blue barrels, dual-action triggerlocks. He had it custom-fitted to his shoulder and loaded with .557 Winchester Failsafes capable of punching fist-sized holes through the grille of a Mack truck. He removes it from its hiding place behind a self-painted pastoral landscape Pamela had deemed too hideous for display.

“Albert, I am warning you!”

The man’s voice a reedy squawk: “Listen, buddy, she told me she was a widower—”

“No problem…buddy.”

“Albert, you’re embarrassing me!”

“Terribly sorry, dear.”

Albert exits the closet. The man has time to look down two impossibly large, terribly dark barrel mouths before the Van Doekken barks, punching a dinner-plate-sized hole through the man’s ample gut. The man stares, with the remarkable calm only extreme shock confers, into the newly organized cross-section of his stomach: Flesh ringing the wound frosted charcoal-black, spine split like a jackknifed tractor-trailer, vertebrae winking whitely and a random orgy of mashed organs spattering the wall behind him. The man says: “Oh, duuuude,” and then his head and a goodly portion of his shoulders are vaporized in a spray of blood and bone when Albert squeezes the second trigger. The man’s headless body topples off the bed, clutching handfuls of white satin sheet in its still-spasming fists. Lying on the floorboards, it resembles a gingerbread man bitten by a very large, very cruel child.

“Oh my Gaaaaawd—” Pamela moans.

“Hold still, dear. This thing’s a real bitch to reload.”

Albert snaps the chambers open, inhaling the smell of spent gunpowder, and slots two more rounds. But by then Pamela is racing across the front lawn, naked as a babe, aristocratic body stumbling, piss running down those creamy coltish legs. Albert has never seen his darling wife move quite so fast.

He sits on the bed’s red wetness. One of the man’s eyes—cornflower blue, Al notes, the most brilliant blue he has ever seen—is stuck to the wall, beside a tattered stub of flesh that might’ve been an ear. He watches the eyeball lose adhesion and fall off the wall. It rolls to his feet and he steps on it. He laughs.

He is still laughing when the police arrive. Still laughing as they cuff him.

Still laughing into the judge’s stern face until she raps her gavel and says:

“Mister Rose, you’re headed to the Coliseum.”

Then, abruptly and all at once, Albert stops laughing.

— | — | —

The Man of God

This is how it begins:

The moment Jackson Cantrell convinced his stepbrother to stab his own eyes out to better behold God, he knew there was something powerful about religion.

“Can you see, brother?” he had asked, his voice a mellow lilt.

“No, brother, I cannot.”

“Do you want to see, my brother?”

“Yes,” His stepbrother knelt prostrate, arms outstretched. “Let me see. Please.”

Jackson reached into the folds of his robe and produced a kitchen fork. Light pinwheeled off the stainless-steel tines. He placed it in his stepbrother’s trembling hand.

“The light of the Lord can only be glimpsed through sacrifice.” He ran his fingers through his stepbrother’s sweated-shined hair. “The kingdom of God can only be glimpsed through a veil of tears. Will you take the next step?”

“Yes, brother.”

“Then surrender your sight to God.”

His stepbrother drove the fork into his eye. The tines punctured his eyelid and sunk deep into the socket. His eyeball erupted with a liquid farting noise and corneal jelly gushed out like red, veiny egg yolk. The sight reminded Jackson of a bath bead bursting in warm water. Although shocked by the pain, his neck-veins standing out like fat tubes, Jackson’s stepbrother pulled the fork, tines now webbed with viscous red runners, out of his dead eye and jammed it into the other one. Jackson peered into the emptied socket: The flesh was red and wet, the surface crisscrossed with slender capillaries that resembled the veins on a leaf.

His stepbrother’s hands clutched at Jackson’s robe.

“Can you see the Almighty?” Jackson’s hands were clasped in prayer. “Do the gates of Heaven shimmer before you?”

“I…I can’t see anything,” his stepbrother said. “J–juh–just pain.”

“Then you are unworthy,” Jackson said, and left his stepbrother to his blindness.

Jackson Cantrell was, at the heart of the matter, a lazy man. A lazy man with a sharply incisive mind and an overabundance of charisma. What he sought was a way to make weak-minded men lend him their blind and unwavering support. He quickly realized no tool better suited his aim than religion. Like many before him—Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Billy Graham, Jim Jones and David Koresh, to name but a few—Jackson harnessed the power of the Word, honing it like a blade on a whetstone.

First came the faith-healing: Jackson walked the streets of Toronto, restoring sight to blind men, giving legs to those who were paralyzed, clasping divine hands around deaf ears. Nobody saw Jackson the puppeteer, Jackson the snake-oil peddler, Jackson paying healthy men to play cripples, sighted men to feign blindness, virile men to claim impotence. Many believed what they saw. Jackson has the body of a preacher: Tall and lean and geometrically angular, with shoulder-blades that rise into jagged peaks, long blonde hair and a sharply curved nose, cold blue eyes like crosshairs. A jarring solidity defines him, a sense he could weather any storm, forge onwards while others fell and died. His voice is by turns sandpaper-harsh and butter-mellow, a voice commanding attention. He favors in a white suit, white spats, and an albino leather coat. Moses for a new millennium.

Next came the spiritual retreat. People flocked to him. Men and women, young and old, all with the same hunger in their eyes—the same terrible need. He took them in, took their money, built a retreat in the country. Locked away from society and studying Jackson’s bastardized tenets, his disciples were reborn.

First polygamy was adopted: Men took women as trophies and traded them like baseball cards. Then rape was acceptable and soon the night was alive with the screams of women and men and children strapped down and mercilessly abused. Jackson spurred his followers to greater depths of perversity, finding biblical loopholes to justify torture, and murder, and pedophilia: “Corinthians 17:8: Thy wife and thy child are possessions of thine alone, to be happ’ly occupied to thy betterment,” he quoted to an ardent male supplicant making voracious eyes at his six-year-old daughter. The retreat, christened “Eden Revisited,” was transformed into a modern-day Sodom. Jackson’s flock, some 500-strong, were utterly under his spell.

And today, as he watches a brother and sister fuck in the dirt, Jackson has an epiphany.

He is bored. Terribly, thoroughly bored.

This is how it ends:

“People,” Jackson’s voice echoes in a cavernous barn, “we have come far, achieved great things. Our ways may be frowned upon by society, but only because society is blind to the Lord!”

A resounding cheer from the gathered throng.

“These last days I have sat in council with God. He is proud of how we live according to His wishes. But,” his voice drops and his fingertips whiten around the edges of a cheap plywood lectern, “He said His bastard children are destroying what He created, perverting His scheme, poisoning His gift. My brothers and sisters, God has promised a great scourging—apocalypse!”

A murmur passes through the crowd. Men in flowing robes circulate with silver trays.

“The time has come to test your faith!” Jackson slams his fist on the podium. “You who truly believe must prove yourselves! Trust in me and take my gift! We must take flight before the way is clogged with the heretics and infidels; arise and accept my bounty!”

Each tray holds hypodermic needles filled with 20cc’s of strychnine. They are taken eagerly. Parents take two or three and roll up their children’s sleeves, tapping the crooks of thin arms to raise veins.

“Yes, my lambs! Remember how I love you, and know how I treasure your sacrifice!”

“Take me, God,” a woman screams, needle jutting from her arm, white froth streaking her bluing lips. “Take me from this world of sin into your sweet loving arms!”

“Hear my prayer!” A middle-aged man sits on the floor, the heads of his dead children resting in his lap. “Let us be reunited in Heaven!”

“Good, my children! Rise to meet your God!”

The barn is soon a snakepit of arms and legs spider-skittering in the dust, bodies shaking as if electrocuted. Women bite their tongues off as their jaw tendons clamp spastically and men tear their throats out as the poison constricts their esophageal muscles. Children run in headless-chicken circles as bodily liquids explode from their asses and their mouths and—cartoonishly, horrifically—from their ears and noses and the seams of their eyes.

Then the barn doors are thrown wide and uniformed men are fanning around the perimeter. Clad in body-armor and face shields, semi-automatic carbines slung over their shoulders.

“Shit,” one of them says as he bends to take a pulse. “Medics!”

The task force wades through his flock, administering anti-toxin shots to those showing feeble signs of life. Jackson kneels, arms upraised. The SWAT team leader approaches him.

“You sick fuck.”

“It’s not too late, son. You too can be saved—”

The officer clubs the preacher’s skull with his rifle butt. Jackson does not go down but instead stares up at the officer, beatific, blood trickling across his forehead.

“I forgive you. You know not what you do.”

“Baby-killing freak!”

Another blow sends Jackson to the floor.

“Cuff the fucker. He’s earmarked for the Coliseum.”

Upon hearing those words, for the first time in years, Jackson Cantrell is afraid.

««—»»

Telephone Conversation Between Ontario Premier Henry Triggs and Minister of Corrections Leon Knight. March 13, 1990.

KNIGHT: Hello.

TRIGGS: Leo old hoss!

KNIGHT: Hank!

TRIGGS: How’s tricks?

KNIGHT: Busy. Election time and I’m canvassing like hell—

TRIGGS: Uh-huh. Pressing the flesh, kissing babies, the whole rigmarole. How’s the campaign shaping up?

KNIGHT: Tight, Hank, real tight. Kelvin’s running hard. A lot of soft money powering that campaign and he’s going to run the coffers dry—

TRIGGS: Kelvin’s a paper tiger; if he makes office he’ll be bent over to the corporate thugs who feathered his nest.

KNIGHT: He’s got a nice head of steam rolling, though, making sappy podium speeches about leniency and prisoner’s rights and all sorts of heartstring-tugging bullshit.

TRIGGS: That son-of-a-bitch. [Pause] What banner are you running under?

KNIGHT: You know me, Hank: I wept the day this country abolished the death penalty. Now what do we do with all the pieces of human trash that litter our penal system—the serial killers and recidivist rapists and child molesters, the incorrigible freaks who’ll never see the light of day? I just read a report listing the sticker price our government foots for incarceration: Sixty thou per felon, per year.

TRIGGS: Jesus H. Kee-rist.

KNIGHT: Sixty grand supplies a murderer with cable television, three hots and a cot, a weight room and a library. We’re talking a goddamn health spa!

TRIGGS: Just yesterday I was talking with one of my constituents, a retiree, name of Estella Bainbridge. She said: “Mr. Triggs, why does my pension tax support the man who murdered my daughter?” So I ask her who her daughter was: Georgia Bainbridge, victim of Nathan “Shovelface” Lange, one of your sixty-thou-a-year residents at Fulgate.

KNIGHT: [Sighs]

TRIGGS: So I said: “Mrs. Bainbridge, your pension shouldn’t have to support that awful man, but we live in a democracy, and sometimes unfair things happen in democracies.” I felt so goddamn… inadequate.

KNIGHT: Join the club. If I had a nickel for every time I gave the old sometimes unfair things happen in a democracy spiel—

TRIGGS: But does it have to be, old hoss? Don’t you want to look a victim’s family straight in the eye and tell them, “I did all I could?” Goddamn it, I do. Did we fight so hard to assume office just to pitty-pat around the real issues?

KNIGHT: Hold on, Clarence Darrow. When did you become so idealistic?

TRIGGS: Just listen: I was up in the Northwest Territories a few weeks back. I’ll tell you, Leo, it’s the bleakest patch of earth I’ve ever seen: Nothing but rocks and ice and snow. There’s an abandoned arena on the outskirts of Whitehorse; the town used to have a minor-league hockey team. Seats twenty thousand or so and it’s isolated: No factories, houses, or shops for miles around. And I got to thinking…well, maybe we convert it into a prison.

KNIGHT: [Laughing] Now you’ve gone and done it. Now you’ve gone and done—

TRIGGS: What’s the problem?

KNIGHT: Do you know how much it’d cost to convert an arena—an arena out in boony-land, no less—into a prison? You’d need to gut the insides, build cells and guard towers, provide all the amenities those goddamn civil rights groups bleat about—

TRIGGS: Nope. Way I’m thinking, you don’t need to do any of that. Yeah, you’d have to ensure security met prison standard, install closed-circuit cameras, post guards outside the arena.

KNIGHT: Wait…you’re proposing no cells, no guards?

TRIGGS: Bin-go.

KNIGHT: [Long Pause] Hope you’ve got a parachute handy, Henry. ’Cause you just sailed off the deep end.

TRIGGS: You don’t think a segment of the population wants it? Be honest: You want it, don’t you? So do I. We’re two of the most influential politicians in the country. So tell me: Why can’t it happen?

KNIGHT: Why can’t it happen? Listen to yourself. How can we rationalize treating human beings like animals? It’d be a nightmare.

TRIGGS: I agree; it would be a nightmare. And so what? I’m not suggesting we incarcerate ticky-tack criminals. We populate this place with the scum of the scum who deserve—no matter what the bleeding hearts trumpet—to suffer.

KNIGHT: I can’t believe I’m pursuing this, but…what about food? What about treating sickness? What about gang violence? What about—

TRIGGS: What about any of it? Drop food every day and let them scrounge. If you’re lucky, you eat; if not, tough shit, you starve. Get sick, bye-bye, you die. Gangs? I say go for it: Create factions, war over turf, spill blood. These men are beasts. Let them live by the only law they understand: The law of the goddamn jungle.

KNIGHT: Jesus, Hank. That’s merciless.

TRIGGS: You think Nathan Lange showed any mercy with Georgia Bainbridge? Did you know he poked her eyes out and stuck his pecker into her sockets—he fucked Georgia Bainbridge’s goddamn eyes, Leon, with the poor thing alive and screaming the whole time. You think he deserves three hots and a cot, evenings whacking off to HBO softcore? That’s the goddamn problem, Hank, and you know it: Everyone’s got a hard-on to show mercy to sick fucks who don’t possess a shred of it themselves.

KNIGHT: Jesus, Hank–settle down. You’re preaching to the choir. But the proposal would encounter a massive backlash; people saying it’s savage, a social experiment with human guinea pigs…

TRIGGS: Look at it another way: It’s a second chance. The prisoners live under their own rules and free from intervention. They might co-exist peacefully.

KNIGHT: Come on, Hank…

TRIGGS: I said it’s a possibility.

KNIGHT: And what about the families? The mother who sees her kid as the boy who picked her buttercups and never forgot her birthday?

TRIGGS: I’d say, “Ma’am, we live in a democracy, and sometimes things happen in a democracy that we don’t agree with.” And I’d say it with an ear-to-ear smile.

KNIGHT: It could be seen as cruel and unusual punishment.

TRIGGS: There’ll be roadblocks. But the only reason I’ve made it this far is because I’ve kept my ear to the ground and my finger on the pulse of my constituents. People want this, old hoss; want it as bad as you and I. With our combined clout we could run with it. Step on a few toes and burn a few bridges, sure. But speaking as your friend, I’d willingly cross that line.

KNIGHT: You’re serious, aren’t you?

TRIGGS: [Silence]

KNIGHT: This could be political hara-kiri…let me think about it. There’ll be serious opposition.

TRIGGS: Sure will polarize the vote between you and Kelvin, huh?

KNIGHT: [Laughing] Yeah, that it’ll do.

TRIGGS: Just stew on it, old hoss.

KNIGHT: Okay. Take care, Hank.

The proposal should have been shot down in the Senate, or smothered in the House of Commons. But it wasn’t. Triggs and Knight pulled every political string and called in every long-held favor at their disposal and, riding a wave of popularity, did everything they could to ram the initiative down the government’s throat.

There were pro- and anti-prison rallies. The pro-prison contingent provided a soapbox for the family members of murdered, raped, or molested victims to speak with heartfelt emotion about the need for justice. The anti-prison faction trotted out family members of the prospective inmates who spoke with heartfelt emotion about humanity and clemency. Editorials in the press were wildly conflicting: Some heralded the prison as a hard-line necessity, others decried it as a sure sign of societal decay.

The vote carried on the slimmest of margins. Thirty-four ayes to thirty-three nays.

It was that slim margin that converted the Whitehorse Sportsplex into the first “Hands-off” prison in the free world. Although officially known as the Innuvik Penitentiary, the press conferred its more widely-known moniker:

The Coliseum.

On October 15th, 1993, the first twenty prisoners were unleashed.

— | — | —

II. NEW FISH

A white school bus with barred windows carries four prisoners down a freshly-plowed road. December, snow covering the land in a thick white blanket. The road runs alongside the swift-flowing Ross river, its surface studded with drifting chunks of ice.

The prisoners arrived at the Whitehorse airport via prison charter. Exiting the Douglas DC-9 under a graysteel sky, their eyes took in a Dali-esque landscape: The rocky ground was scabbed with patches of scrub brush where sickly ferns struggled for survival. Gaunt winter hares, white fur falling out in mangy clumps, desperately scrounged the landing strip for shoots that had survived the early frosts. The few trees within view were so dwarfish and wind-twisted that they did not resemble trees so much as a madman’s conception of trees.

They were loaded onto a bus that traced a direct path through Whitehorse. The town was a mishmash of old and new, modern and archaic: A Burger King stood side-by-side a general store selling moose meat and spring-load traps and whicker pelt-stretchers; modern-looking houses were erected kiddy-corner to tarpaper shacks; a wide expanse between two office buildings was furrowed with dogsled tracks. The road merged with the TransCanada highway and an hour later the black-domed roof of the Coliseum came into view.

“All eyes forward,” a slate-faced guard says. The prisoner’s eyes are perhaps the only body part they can move, all other extremities being strapped down. “Master Guard’s gonna debrief you piles of shit. Listen carefully. Anything you hear could help on the inside.”

The bus passes through a chainlink barrier topped with spiraling razor-wire. Each corner of the compound is occupied by a guard tower with .50 Gatling guns mounted on sandbagged tripods. A row of kennels runs along the fence, housing twenty mixed breed Husky-Neapolitan Mastiffs trained to attack with deadly force. Two guards stand next to an inclined runway. They are bundled in powder-blue parkas and padded kepi hats, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. One of them holds a burlap bag. The bus grinds to a halt and the prisoners are offloaded.

The Master Guard looks like he stepped from the pages of Soldier of Fortune: A hard, square jaw, a salt-and-pepper buzzcut, every movement tightly controlled and militaristic. He says, “Gimme the specs on these mutts.”

The accompanying guard hands him a clipboard:

PRISONER:

NAME: Cantrell, Jackson

HEIGHT: 6’4”

WEIGHT: 200

AGE: 39

CRIME: 1st Degree Murder, 487 counts

SENTENCE: Life, no possibility of parole

The Master Guard passes a gloved hand through Cantrell’s long blonde hair. “Oooh, the boys are going to looove you. Just like a girl.”

PRISONER:

NAME: Rose, Albert

HEIGHT: 5’10”

WEIGHT: 175

AGE: 45

CRIME: 2nd Degree Murder, 1 count

SENTENCE: Life, no possibility of parole

“Poor bastard.” The Master Guard shakes his head. “Life in the Coliseum for a second-degree rap. You killed the wrong guy, my friend.”

PRISONER:

NAME: Ruddock, Harlan

HEIGHT: 6’5”

WEIGHT: 318

AGE: 37

CRIME: 2nd Degree Murder, 2 counts

SENTENCE: Life, no possibility of parole

“Jesus. Harlan ‘Beast’ Ruddock. So you finally made it.” The Master Guard smiles. “I watched you during a stint at Gellsburg. Always figured you’d end up here.” He pats Harlan’s shoulder. Like patting a block of limestone. “You’re gonna make some waves, my friend. A fuckin’ tsunami.”

PRISONER:

NAME: Pierre Laframboise

HEIGHT: 5”7’

WEIGHT: 155

AGE: 21

CRIME: 1st Degree Murder, 3 counts

SENTENCE: Life, no possibility of parole

“Pierre Laframboise, the Butcher of Montreal.” A smirk from the Master Guard. “So young, so righteously fucked up. Bet you thought you were king shit when you were slicing and dicing junkie streetwalkers. Well out here you’re dog shit, boy. Give you five days, tops.”

“No way, pig,” Pierre says in heavily-accented English. He is whippet-thin, arms hanging low and marsupial, like an orangutan’s. “I ain’t scared of nobody, nothing.”

“I ain’t a-scar’d of no-butty, no-ting, peeg,” the Master Guard mimics. “We’ll see, Frenchie. Wait until you meet up with the Skineaters, the Baboon Boys. Then we’ll see who’s scared. I’ll be watching, Pierre—watching you twist in the wind.”

“No way…pig.”

The Master Guard smiles in the manner of someone who knows a secret but isn’t telling.

The Coliseum’s entry runway is enclosed within a chainlink dome. The Master Guard pushes a button and the dome’s gate rattles open. At the end of the runway is a tombstone-shaped door made of two-foot-thick steel.

“Okay, freaks,” the Master Guard says. “Let’s run down the specs on your new digs. The Innuvik Penitentiary is a three-tiered arena with basement and equipment wing. Currently we house seventy-five inmates, but that number tends to fluctuate. Last year there was an…incident…in which the population fell from sixty-seven to three in the span of forty-eight hours. There will not be any guard intervention; this is the last time you’ll see us.” A shrug. “It is also the last time you’ll see the sky, the last time you’ll taste clean air, the last time you’ll feel sunlight on your faces. As the kitty once said, tough titty.

“Want to tunnel out? Be my guest: a 50-foot-deep trench is sunk around the perimeter, concrete-filled to a five-foot width. If you manage to dig below fifty feet, you’ll find bedrock. So go ahead and dig until your hands are bloody. You’ll never escape, but it helps pass the time.”

Jackson Cantrell falls to his knees, praying in a fervent whisper.

“Ain’t gonna do you no good in there, Cantrell,” the Master Guard says. “Manage to stay alive for a couple months, you’ll forget there ever was such a place as Heaven.”

“Never,” Cantrell says. “Never, heretic.”

The Master Guard favors Jackson with the same Cheshire-cat smile he gave Pierre. “If you’re looking at that roof, thinking about scuttling into the rafters and punching your way through, think again. The entire dome is electrified; not enough to kill but plenty enough to scramble your melon. But I’d like to see someone try.” He points to the guard towers, the kennels. “It’d give us a chance to try out those machine guns and get those dogs some exercise.” He nods at the other guard and says, “Empty the bag.”

The guard upends the burlap sack. An assortment of objects fall to the ground: Lead pipes and lengths of serrated wire, slivers of glass sharpened to crude points, rough two-by-twos studded with nails and wood screws.

“When this place was converted, the planners removed certain things—the Zamboni, the concession equipment, certain chemical agents—that you boys might get into trouble with. The rest they left intact. So here’s the deal, kiddies: Hope you watched Bob Villa, because if you want to live you’d better be a handyman. Everyone inside is packing. Everyone. You’re not packing, you’re—” He drags his thumb across his neck in a throat-slitting gesture. “My advice is to grab whatever you can find—a busted bit of railing, a wedge of metal, hell, a pocketful of rocks—and stay alert at all times. You’ll never sleep peacefully again, but if you’re armed at least you can wake up swinging.”

He unhooks a cylindrical gadget from his belt: Shiny metal, roughly the size of a Coke can. “Percussion grenade. Nothing that’ll kill a man, unless you jam it up his ass. We hid thirty when the prison opened, toys for our boys. Treat it like an Easter-egg hunt: Find ‘em, use ’em. So ends the lesson.”

The guards close in. Their weapons are cocked, their fingers tight on the triggers.

“Going to unchain you now,” the Master Guard says. Assault one of my men—chip one fucking fingernail—and I’m going to stuff this scattergun up your ass and trigger-fuck you until your guts spray the snow in a design Jackson Pollack would proudly sign his name to.”

One by one, the convicts are uncuffed.

“Stand very still; we drink a lot of coffee when it gets this cold. Makes us jittery.”

The prisoners are escorted into the covered runway. The gate closes. Moments later their eardrums are thrumming with the current of high-voltage electricity.

“The runway is now electrified. You touch it, you fry.” The Master Guard crosses his arms and shivers. “You freaks remember high school biology? Ever swab a doorknob with a Q-tip, smear it in a Petri dish, see what grows?” He shivered again. This time the cold had nothing to do with it. “Well, there are things growing behind that door unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Unlike anything you could possibly imagine.”

At ramp’s end, the steel door clatters open.

Albert Rose is crying.

“Be strong, my brother,” Jackson Cantrell whispers.

“You’d best not listen to that man, Rose,” the Master Guard’s face is bisected by chainlink mesh. “The last 500 folks who took his advice bought one-way tickets to the boneyard.”

Albert retreats to the guards. “Please,” he says, arms outstretched. “Don’t do this.”

“Can’t do nothing for you, Rose.”

“Please…not in there…please…God, just open the gate!”

“No can do.” The Master Guard’s voice is a dialtone, even as Albert’s fingertips stray near to electrified metal. “Gonna fry yourself, Rose.”

Then, suddenly, it is like a switch turns on—or, more aptly, off—in Albert’s head. His face freezes over like ice on a pond’s surface. Deep inside his mind something snaps with pencil-thin ease. He crosses his arms, and turns, and descends the runway.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil—”

“Shut up, preacher-man,” Pierre says.

Harlan moves down the side of the runway. His eyes dart left and right. He realizes the game—that’s what incarceration is to him; a grand game—will commence as soon as the prison doors close. He wants to be in a position to excel.

“Move it, freaks!” the Master guard shouts. His voice is gilt with a keen edge of paranoia. “Move it!”

Harlan disappears into the darkness, his massive body hugging the wall.

Jackson places his hand on Pierre’s shoulder. “I heard what you did to those women, Pierre. Lord God in Heaven will forgive you, but you must repent.”

The Frenchman shrugs his hand off viciously. “Gonna kill you, preacher-man.”

They enter the Coliseum.

“Oh, Pamela,” Albert says. “Oh, Pamela, Pamela, Pamela…”

He melts into the blackness.

“Lockdown! Now, now!”

The steel door rumbles. Pressurized seals engage.

“Back to your stations,” the Master Guard exhales heavily. “Let’s see how the new fish make out.”

««—»»

The first thing to strike is the smell. Two kinds of smells. There is a topmost scent of wet rot and stale sweat and mildew. But beneath lies a deeper and much more powerful smell: The battlefield stench of sickness and men dying slowly.

The arena is dark and warm with three seating levels: Gold seats, red seats and, forming the top level, blue seats. Each tier is alive with furtive movement: Dim shapes scuttle about in the darkened upper reaches. A song—“Hip to be Square” by Huey Lewis and The News—filters out of recessed speakers. This same song has played, on a near-neverending loop, since the prison opened. It was turned off only once, for five minutes: The length of the Coliseum’s one and only prison inspection. The inspection had been perfunctory, an external structural check-over to make sure security had not been compromised, and the inspectors would likely have cared less about the predictable prison soundtrack: The enforcement of humane conditions at the Coliseum rated about as low on the priority list as the Coliseum’s denizens rated the importance of mercy and decency—in other words, pretty fucking low.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…”

Like four bear-cubs venturing from the den for the first time, the convicts move out onto the arena floor. Most of the advertisements plastered around the perimeter—Sunoco Gasoline, Royal Bank, Canadian Tire, Wal-Mart—have been torn down and carted off to build ramshackle shelters. The remaining advert, for a popular chain of coffee shops, has been scratched with a jag of metal to read: Tim Horton Can Suk My Cock. The penalty box door hangs ajar and dark matter pools from the entryway: A communal shitter.

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses…”

The arena floor was once covered with a smooth sheen of ice, but now chunks of cement have been carved away to give it the appearance of a pothole-pocked stretch of tarmac. The men pick their way carefully as their eyes adjust to the gloom. The sly sounds of movement surround them like mice in the walls. Harlan crosses to the far boards, pinning his broad back to them.

“As we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation…”

It’s hip to be square—da-da-da-nah-nah-nah—So hip to be square…

Pierre shoots a disgusted look at his companions and forges forward. His posture suggests a modern-day Columbus fording unknown territory. Jackson flattens his back against the boards opposite Harlan. Albert stands between them, a deer in headlights.

“For thine is the kingdom, for ever and ever, Amen.”

Ten figures materialize at rink’s edge, arranged phalanx-style. Albino-white skin, bodies draped in filthy robes. Shoeless feet shuffling slowly, spines curved like fruit-laden branches.

“Jesus Christ,” Pierre says. “Who da ’ell are they?”

Another group blocks off the far side. These ones are taller and more muscular, arranging themselves in a loose semicircle. Their naked bodies are hairy, ape-like, fingers brushing the cement. Their leader, a squat fireplug of a man, lurches forward and hunkers on his haunches.

“They’re ours!” the albino-man shouts across the arena. “We saw them first. We have…” He searches his memory bank for the right word. “Dibs.”

The ape-man looses a feral howl that echoes across the arena. “How many times do I have to tell you, Jeremy—”

“My name is Gregor!” albino-man shrieks. “Gregor of the tribe Skineater—”

“No, you are Jeremy Hanson of Red Deer, Alberta,” ape-man says. “Jeremy Hanson who ate his parents.”

“Gregor! Greee–GOR!”

The ape-man smiles the smile of a natural predator. “Fine…Gregor. Who does your…tribe…want?”

“All of them.”

“Be reasonable.”

Gregor slicks his tongue across his teeth. Harlan notices they’ve been filed into sharp points, resembling a gallery of busted glass. “Do you question my will, Edward? Do you dare—”

Edward the ape-man snaps two gnarled fingers. His tribe advances. Each wields an iron bar studded with jags of scrap metal. “Don’t fuck with me, Gregor. You might gain some clout around here—if you weren’t always eating one another, that is. No more dick-swinging, now, or I’ll come over there and cut your face off.”

Gregor sneers, an awful sight. “Fine, let’s each take two. I want them,” pointing at Harlan and Jackson.

Edward turns to his group and whispers gutturally. It’s as if the Coliseum is choosing sides for a pick-up softball game. The iris of an infrared camera pans to capture the scene.

“You can have the girly-boy,” Edward says. “We’re taking the other one.”

“No, no, no,” Gregor stamps his foot like a testy child. “We saw him first…he’s ours!”

“Don’t make me come over there. Don’t make me pry every broken tooth out of your skull and stomp your face flat on the stones.” Edward slaps his iron bar into his palm. “Don’t make me do that.”

“We want him, too,” Gregor points at Pierre. The Frenchman smiles like someone who’s been invited to join an exclusive fraternity. “You take the other one.”

“We don’t want him.”

“Then leave him for the buzzards.”

“But, Jeremy, you’re the buzzard.”

Gregor bares his sharpened teeth. “Just wait. Your time is coming.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Edward says. “But until you control the sky-meat you’re no threat to me.” He points at Harlan. “You just won the lottery, you lucky prick.”

Edward’s group is fifteen-strong. Not one of them could take Harlan one-on-one (or two-on-one, or three-on-one for that matter), but many fire-ants are capable of killing a scorpion. He could run and hide…but why? He’s been accepted into the dominant group. Their leader is overconfident—confidence breeds arrogance, arrogance breeds recklessness…and recklessness is the prelude to a fall.

“Gather ’round.” Edward’s teeth are black stumps, gums seeping blood. His breath smells like the alleyway behind an abattoir. He cups Harlan’s groin and says, “Let’s be sociable.”

The Baboon Boys form a gap-toothed circle around their newest member, gibbering like monkeys and clutching at his overalls. One man leaps onto Harlan’s back, knotting his fists in Harlan’s hair. The Beast hauls the man over his shoulder and snaps the writhing body across his knee like so much driftwood. Others wrap themselves around his legs and chest, screaming and spitting and dragging him to the floor. Harlan’s skull ricochets off the cement and darkness floods in…

“You are zo white,” Pierre says, sauntering toward the ghostly stickmen. “Like ze ghost, no?”

Gregor crooks a skeletal finger at Jackson and says, “Keep.” Then he points at Pierre and whispers, “Meat.”

The Skineater tribe fractures. Half of them advance on Jackson, who is cowering beside the shit-streaked penalty box. The white wraiths lay their hands on him.

“Do not worry,” they say. “You are the chosen.”

“Yes, brothers,” Jackson smiles weakly. “I see the light of temperance in your eyes.”

Gregor runs his hands over Jackson’s face and neck, his sweaty hair. “Take him home.”

“Praise you, brother,” Jackson’s eyes shimmer with unspilled tears. “Praise you.”

The other group strings out to form a circle around the Frenchman. Their mouths are open and their jagged teeth glitter like spear-tips.

“Ey dere, guys…” Pierre’s smile performs an abrupt vanishing act.

The men of the Skineater tribe press closer. Blue spiderweb veins track the milky flesh of their necks and arms, resembling dark brushstrokes on an oriental plate. Deep scars trace the curve of their hairless skulls like organic racing stripes.

“Come on, dere…we friends, right?”

They descend on Pierre. Some grab his arms while others knit themselves between his legs like ghostly parasites.

“Jesus Christ, stop dis—AAAHHH!”

Sharpened teeth sink into Pierre’s flesh, tearing free chunks of living tissue. Pierre screams as a mouth clamps over the upper helix of his ear and rips it off with the sound of worn upholstery tearing. Spidery hands all over him, slashing at his overalls in search of the soft meat underneath. Someone bites the top of his head, then another wet ripping sound as a patch of Pierre’s hair and scalp is torn off and stuffed into a hungry maw.

A pair of greedy lips clamps over his own and a foreign tongue probes the warm recesses of his mouth. Pierre can only gasp as his tongue is torn out and spat on the dusty floor. Then his lips are chewed off to leave his naked pink gums and peg-square teeth devoid of shelter. His incisors snap open and closed and, lacking the soft muffling flesh, they sound like novelty chattery teeth. His boots are pried from his feet and mouths batten around his frantically wriggling toes. And someone is tearing at his belly, now, tearing with long sharp nails and there is a horrid liquid hissing sound as Pierre’s stomach opens up like someone jerking the seam on a Ziploc bag full of medical waste and its contents—a half-digested bran muffin, the now-masticated contents of a foil packet of airline peanuts, a can of Diet Coke—splash across the ground with a stench that defies all description.

So hip to be square, yeah, hip to be square…

Blood streaking Pierre’s body and blood staining his yellow uniform and blood every-fuckin-where else besides. Pierre barely feels his nose ripped from its moorings or the blood gushing in to flood his sinus cavity. A mouth fastens over his eye socket and sucks out his sight, the pulpy orb mashed between phantom jaws, an insistent tongue exploring the raped socket. Finally, horrifically, a shard of glass is used to cut around Pierre’s head, under the jawbone and across the forehead, and his face lifted off, all in one piece, like a Halloween mask. The Skineaters fight over this grisly prize like dingoes.

Pierre Laframboise, the Bloody Butcher of Quebec, is dragged into the stands.

Albert Rose sits alone on the concrete floor.

As always, he is unwanted.

««—»»

“You sad-sack fuck.” The Master Guard watches Pierre’s mutilated body disappear up a darkened stairwell. “You had no idea.”

The black-and-white image flickers, fades to snow, reappears. Most cameras in the Coliseum have been destroyed by the inmates; the control-room console is scattered with dead screens. Only the Eyes In The Sky remain, which allow the guards to monitor roughly one-quarter of the total prison area. The ongoing activity in many sectors—the basement, the equipment wing, the hallways girding the arena floor—are unknown to the guards.

The Master Guard yawns. “I’ve got to go home and check in with the little lady,” he tells the nightwatch security man. Centered on a tiny 8-by-8 screen, Albert Rose sits crosslegged, head in hands. “Keep an eye on that poor bastard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing we can do, but…”

“Goodnight, sir.”

“Yeah. Goodnight.”

— | — | —

III. INITIATION

Springtime. Ten-year-old Harlan Ruddock roams the schoolyard, dead-heading dandelions. The bell rings to end recess but Harlan ignores it. He imagines himself as an airborne Ranger shot down behind enemy lines and forced to fight his way back to allied territory: He tosses clumps of soil overhand, dirt-grenades, making the sound of an explosion when they land. He hears the school doors open and ducks behind a trash can as his teacher scans the schoolyard.

“Harlan?” she says. “Harlan, time to come inside!”

She is a kind woman and a fine teacher but school holds no interest for him. She gives the field a final pass. The door closes. Harlan is free.

He walks along the school wall, ducking to pass under the open classroom windows. There is much to be done with this newfound freedom: He could venture to the city dump and pick through the leavings of society, go fishing in the nature preserve, or head home, crawl through the basement window, and watch Looney Tunes with the volume turned low—

“Hey, boyo.” The voice comes from behind. “Supposed to be in school.”

It’s Ferdie Gibson, the groundskeeper. Ferdie’s an older man with white hair sprouting above a pair of lumpen ears; the same wiry hair sprouts from his ears, and his nostrils, fluttering like New Year’s party favors when he exhales. He is dressed in grass-stained overalls unbuttoned to mid-chest to reveal pale skin, a nest of sweaty chest hair, and a dangling St. Christopher’s medallion. His hands are large, knotted and look like they enjoy pinching things.

“Feeling sick, sir,” Harlan says. “I’m going home.”

Ferdie slants his eyes and digs between his yellow teeth with a yellow fingernail. “Got a permission note, boyo?”

“My mom called. I…I don’t have a note.”

“One piss-poor excuse, you shifty li’l booger.” Ferdie grabs Harlan by the wrist. “To the principal’s office with ya.”

Even at ten years old Harlan severely outweighs the spindly groundskeeper; he could rip free and run away. But he still possesses that instinctive fear of adults, that inclination to roll over and bare his throat. “Please, mister. Don’t take me back—”

“Too late for that. Take yer med’cine like a man.”

“No, no, wait. I’ll do anything—”

Ferdie stares at Harlan with an expression he’ll become familiar with later in life: Mingled hunger, avarice, and desire. It is the look in a raven’s eyes after it overturns a turtle to peck at its unprotected belly.

“Well,” he says. “Could use some help tendin’ ma chores…”

“Sure,” Harlan says. “Anything you want.”

“’Course, if’n I do this favor, it must be kep’ a secret…”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“Come wit’ me, then.”

Ferdie’s tool-shed is located at the far end of the football field bordering the woods. It smells of wet grass and cedar shavings and cacao hulls. By the light of a sixty-watt bulb, Harlan notes various landscaping implements: A grass-flecked riding lawnmower, a pitchfork with two snapped tines that reminds him of a hockey player’s smile, rusted lawnmower blades hung on pegs like propellers, and rolls of sod covered by a transparent tarp.

“Sit on doon, boyo.” A kerosene stove is clamped to the edge of a workbench. “Fancy a cuppa tea?”

“Uh…sure.”

Harlan sits on frayed lawn chair. Ferdie sets a kettle to boil and places teabags into styrofoam cups.

“’Bout this time of day, the body craves a cuppa tea.” He puts his hands in his pockets; they move under there like rats under a dirty blanket. “The body has many cravin’s, my boy.”

Frayed chair fibers poke through Harlan’s tee-shirt, rubbing uncomfortably against his back. “So, what do you want me to do? I could pick weeds, or—”

“I’ll find a use fer ye. Keep yer trousers on.”

The kettle shrieks. Ferdie rummages through a bench drawer and extracts a bottle of white pills: Lidocaine; a double dosage will paralyze the central nervous system for hours. He crumbles two capsules into the steaming tea.

“Drink oop, while it’s hot.”

The tea’s bitter odor reminds Harlan of hospitals. He sips. It tastes foul.

“Is this,” his Adam’s Apple bobs, “how tea tastes?”

“Good Scottish tea,” Ferdie frowns. “Drink it, boyo, ’less yer lookin’ ta go back ta school.”

Harlan drinks some more. Powder grits between his teeth.

“Good stuff, in’t it?”

“Kind of…strange.” Harlan’s fingertips are like breadsticks. Coldness tracks up his thighs and cuts a numbing trail down his arms. “I…can’t…feel…my…fa…” His facial muscles slacken and his mouth unhinges like a sprung door. Although unable to move, he remains completely aware.

“Look at ye, boyo. What a big, strapping lad.”

For a moment Ferdie just stares at the boy as if he were a wondrous work of art. Then he kneels at Harlan’s feet and wrenches his legs open. A rawboned hand traces the curve of his thighs, moving upwards to cup an undeveloped cock and walnut-sized balls.

“Oooh, what’s that now,” the groundskeeper’s breath stinks of rotting meat marinating in dog shit. “What a monster. Soon ye’ll be makin’ the girlies squirm.”

He peels off Harlan’s tee-shirt. Harlan’s body is dark and hairless. Ferdie peppers the boy’s chest with drooling baby-kisses, tongue circling Harlan’s nipples and darting into his bellybutton. He is making strange cooing noises and nipping the skin of the boy’s armpit.

“Such a beautiful lad. A loovely, loooovely child.”

He lifts young Harlan as if he were a sack of peat moss, draping him over the workbench. Harlan inhales the mingled smells of two-stroke engine oil and paint-thinner, Weed-Ex and ammonia. He focuses on a prefab pegboard hung with gardening shears and chisels, hacksaws and screwdrivers. He stares into one of the tiny black holes in the pegboard, willing himself to disappear into that small black space, somewhere far away, where none of this is happening.

He cannot feel his underpants being removed or the greedy hands fondling his testicles; cannot feel his limp cock milked like a bovine teat or the grease-slicked fingers probing the puckered knothole of his anus.

“Oh, me boyo,” the groundskeeper moans. “Such a bonny wee arse.”

The old man’s turgid cock feels like a wooden dowel stroking Harlan’s ass. A sensation of mild pressure as, with a grunt and a sigh, Ferdie slips himself inside. Then a slow and steady rocking motion. Halan’s face is rubbed raw on the workbench’s unvarnished wood. The groundskeeper kisses his spine, each knobby vertebrae, kisses the nape of his neck, thrusting and thrusting as bloated bluebottle flies alight on their sweat-slick bodies.

“Oooh, what a wunnerful, wunnerful fuck ye are, boyo!”

A furious discharge and then something is flowing between the cleft of Harlan’s ass.

The sound of a zipper hastily zipped.

“Now, me leetle soldier,” Ferdie’s mouth next to his ear, “you were good this afternoon. Keep on bein’ good, keep yer gob zipped, and I maybe won’t slit yer leetle throat.”

Harlan woke up in a deserted lot with blood caked on his face and an egg-sized lump on his skull. The seat of his pants was dark with blood and clotted shit. When he tried to walk his anus burned like it had been reamed with a searing poker.

He did as Ferdie said. He kept his mouth shut.

But he never forgot. Never forgave.

And, ten years later, he came back…

“Hello, Ferdie.”

Ferdie stared at the 300-pound behemoth filling the doorway of his tool-shed. Fear etched every feature of his haggard face and saliva glands squirted bitter juices into his mouth. “Who are ye? What ye want with a poor old sod like me?”

“How soon we forget.” Harlan’s right hand gripped the hilt of a fillet knife. “We had some times, Ferdie, you and I. Some high times.”

“Don’t know wha’tcher talkin’ aboot,” Ferdie’s hands scuttled along the bench-top in search of a weapon. “Now git, ya beeg bastard, ’fore I call the cops.”

“Come on now.” Harlan’s body was a solid black wall advancing. “I’m your leetle soldier, aren’t I?”

“Get away, I’m warnin’ ye—”

Harlan grabbed the groundskeeper’s throat and shook his scarecrow-body as if it were a ragdoll. He spun the groundskeeper around and pinned his neck to the workbench like a chicken on a chopping block.

“You popped my cherry, boyo. Let me return the favor.”

Ferdie screamed as the fillet knife was buried to the hilt in his asshole. Blood and soupy excrement exploded from the wound, filling the shed with its slaughterhouse stench. Harlan twisted the blade, slicing inwards and upwards through coiled intestine. Soon the hole was so wide and so distended it seemed for all the world that Ferdie’s anus had exploded with crushed raspberries.

The old groundskeeper screamed and his hands clenched whitely around the workbench. Scarlet pancake batter shot from his shit-hoop with the rude farting noise a near-empty mustard bottle makes when squeezed—schpluuuutt! A loop of viscera distended from the shredded mess. Harlan grabbed it and jerked with all his considerable strength. Ferdie made a babbling noise as ten-odd feet of gut spooled out of his asshole in a greasy spaghetti-string. Harlan grasped it halfway up and squeezed and something shot out the end to spatter his boots. White threads wriggled contentedly in the pool of shit and undigested food: Easily the healthiest tapeworms Harlan had ever seen.

The old man was still babbling and it was getting on Harlan’s nerves so, with care and precision, he cut the man’s cheeks from lips to ears and, hooking his fingers between the lips and underneath the tongue, grasping the lower palate, tore the bottom half of Ferdie’s mouth off. The jawbone snapped with the sound of a firecracker detonated inside a tin can and the rest came away quite easily. The tiny pink tombstone of Ferdie’s tongue flopped and flapped comically. Harlan stuffed the bloody horseshoe of bone and teeth between the cleft of the groundskeeper’s buttocks, burying it elbow-deep.

“You’re a lucky man, Ferdie,” he said with satisfaction. “Few people get the chance to eat their own ass.”

With no more effort than a man hefting a seamstress’s dummy, Harlan hooked the groundskeeper onto a beam-peg. The position allowed Ferdie the opportunity to witness his body drain in greasy clots, intestines continuing to unfurl from his ass like the Hindu rope-trick. Vengeance not yet sated, Harlan sliced the man’s prick off and shoved it into the wet red wound of his mouth. The circumcised purple head poked droopily through Ferdie’s esophageal-hole. Harlan thought it looked like a wild mushroom growing out of his throat.

“Tit-for-tat, old man,” he said. “You’ve got to…

…wake up. Wake up, you big bastard.”

Harlan swims up into consciousness, head throbbing like an abscessed tooth. He’s laid across several stadium seats. Contoured plastic presses against his calves, buttocks, back. He is naked and surrounded: Figures loom above him, grunting and murmuring.

“—check the size of the guy—”

“—I’ve seen him before, at Gellsburg, had a nickname—”

“—the Beast, the Beast, it’s the fucking Beast—”

The hairs on Harlan’s forearms tingle. He glances up to see he’s within five feet of the arena’s electrified dome. Blood rills down the bridge of his nose and there’s a bump on his forehead the size of an infant’s fist.

“Wakey, wakey.” Edward stares down at him. “How you doing, Lurch?”

“Hell of a welcome wagon you got.”

Edward smiles. “Got to know who’s boss, huh?”

“Sure. Keep the priorities straight.”

“Can you sit up?”

Harlan swings his legs off the makeshift bed. The stadium stretches below him. Albert Rose still sits on the arena floor.

“So,” Harlan says. “I’m naked.”

“Observant son-of-a-bitch, ain’t you?”

“Very…hedonistic.”

Edward squeezes Harlan’s thigh. “Name’s Edward Tonnere.”

Edward Tonnere is the second-most infamous serial killer in Canadian history. A halfbreed born on the Sawaganigh Reserve, Edward learned the art of slaughter at an early age. His father ran a backwoods hunting resort catering to wealthy Americans who arrived via pontoon plane from Kentucky and Alabama and Texas, mostly, hoping to bag a fourteen-point buck or a hibernation-grogged grizzly. It was here Edward learned the basics of hunting, trapping, camouflage, and deception that would serve him so well in the future.

He celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday by rigging a bear-trap over the cabin door and waiting for the tungsten jaws to snap shut around his father’s neck, killing him instantly. Next, he hopped in a ’95 Ford Taurus and drove west, Dryden to Winnipeg to Saskatoon to Banff to Kamloops, killing a procession of vagrants, street-walkers, late-night convenience store clerks, and hitchhikers as he went. The Mounties found him holed up in the Double Diamond motor lodge in Burnaby, BC, ten miles north of the American border. Although it never made the papers, officers found him methodically skinning the corpse of Reginald Kent, a 23-year-old handicapped man reported missing from his group home. The room was hung with Tonnere’s “pelts”: Translucent human skins stretched taut on drying racks. The Ford’s trunk contained several rotting, skinless corpses that resembled, as one young patrolman stated, “400-odd pounds of freshly ground chuck.” He is one of the original twenty convicts, of which only three remain.

Harlan knows about Edward Tonnere. But he’s not afraid of him. Not in the slightest.

“Name’s Harlan Ruddock.” He extends his hand.

“That’s not the way we do things in here, boy.” Edward runs his hand over the flesh of Harlan’s abdominals and inner thigh. “What you’ve heard is true: It’s a jungle in here. There may not be palm trees or hanging vines or savage animals—” He bares a mouthful of decay-dappled teeth, “—not the four-legged kind, anyway. Outside it’s all about restraint and denial, about subverting animal impulses. But this place is full of people who don’t play by society’s rules.”

The others listen, enrapt, while Edward sermonizes. Harlan knows better. He’s met people like Edward, men of empty mantras and hollow words, weak men who gain strength by manipulating weaker men. Harlan sees Tonnere for what he really is: A naked sociopath, a snake-oil peddler, a rank charlatan.

“Ever watch how society functions in the animal kingdom?” Edward continues. “Very simplistic: You have territory, you have a leader, you have power struggles. It’s the same in society, except territory is governed by municipal regulations, leaders are democratically elected, and power struggles are power-suit-and-board-office affairs.”

Edward grunts and the group surges over Harlan. They pin his arms and pull his legs open. He could easily break free and toss them over the ledge like writhing bales of hay…but that would only weaken a group he’ll soon command.

Edward steps between his spread thighs. “In here,” he spits on his palm and slicks his erect cock, “territory is taken by force and maintained through violence. Leaders survive through attrition, not election.”

Edward spreads Harlan’s buttocks and circles his cockhead around Harlan’s bunghole.

…Oh, ye’ve got a bonny wee arse…

“Power struggles are swift…” Edward inserts his pecker into Harlan’s anus, “…vicious…” a sharp hiss between clenched teeth; a shuddering moan, “…and final…” thrusting with brutal strokes, busting Harlan wide open, sliding in on the blood.

…Oh, me good leetle soldier, me good leetle soldier…

Harlan does not try to break away, or clench, or hurt his rapist in any way. He lies very still. His huge body rocks steadily.

“You’ve got a nice tight tooter,” Edward says, slipping out with a moist pop. Blood pools on the plastic seat and drips onto the cement. “Now you know,” Edward smiles, “who’s boss.”

“Sure I do.”

Never forget. Never forgive.

Wait. Watch.

Kill.

««—»»

The Skineaters occupy the arena’s bottom bowl. They’ve torn out the seats to form a graded clearing strewn with shards of bone and curlicues of dried blood and stray teeth glittering like dull pearls. The tribe sits in a circle around Jackson Cantrell. Gregor addresses him.

“What brings you here?”

“I was imprisoned for my beliefs, brothers. Imprisoned for working the Lord’s will.”

“Aren’t we all?” Gregor nods. “Didn’t we all suffer the intolerance of others?”

Every man who has ever served time has an excuse: The trial was rigged. I had a bum DA. It wasn’t me, it was the one-armed man, or the third gunman on the grassy knoll. Gregor, a.k.a. Jeremy Hanson, also has an excuse: Society frowns unjustly upon cannibalism.

Jeremy killed for the first time when he was just eight years old. He was playing in the sandbox when his three-year-old brother Craig struck him with a Lincoln Log. Jeremy’s response could be charitably described as excessive: He crushed Craig’s skull with a cinderblock and beat Craig’s body to paste with a baseball bat before eating a portion of the corpse.

Jeremy’s parents refused to believe their darling could have committed so heinous an act. But confronted with a wealth of physical evidence—several of Craig’s baby teeth were found in Jeremy’s stool the next day—they sent their son for psychological treatment. When confronted with evidence of his deed, Jeremy never cried or confessed. In fact he claimed, and seemed to truly believe, that someone else had murdered his brother. I vow to find the real killers, he said on more than one occasion. His counselors were struck with the poignancy of his resolve.

Ten years after killing his brother, Jeremy was released into parental custody. After the homecoming party—mother and father hired a magician and hung a piglet-shaped pinata and adorned the living room in tasteful crepe-paper streamers—he’d drugged their bedtime toddies and lashed them to antique colonial chairs before beating them to death with a recoilless hammer. It was not a crime of passion: Jeremy broke a painstaking path up his parents’s bodies, feet to shinbones to kneecaps to elbows to skulls.

Then he began to feast.

Officers broke down the Hanson’s door to find Jeremy, the prodigal son, neck-deep in his father’s still-warm carcass. He looked, as one bystander noted, like, “An eager child eating a watermelon from the inside out.” His mother’s uterus adorned his head like a grotesque baseball cap. He’d cut her breasts off and shoved the fatty sacks into his underwear. Her labial lips were found in a nearby ashtray, badly burnt. His father’s plastic-sword-skewered testicles floated in a martini glass behind the wet-bar, his flattened scrotum serving as a poor man’s coaster; the glass had been filled with lime Kool-Aid. When officers dragged Jeremy out of his father’s corpse he was clutching a loop of intestine between his teeth. It unfurled for a good twenty feet across the polished walnut floorboards like 50lb test-line off a Shimano reel.

Official Testimony, Calgary Federal Court:

PROSECUTOR: Why did you eat your parents after killing them?

JEREMY: I wanted to see how they tasted.

PROSECUTOR: And tell me, Mr. Hanson, did they taste good?

DEFENSE: Objection, your honor!

PROSECUTOR: Did Mommy taste better than Daddy?

DEFENSE: Objection! Irrelevant!

PROSECUTOR: Salty?

DEFENSE: Objection!

PROSECUTOR: Savory? Scrumptious? Better than chocolate?

DEFENSE: Objection!

JEREMY: They tasted…shitty. Then again, I did eat their colons.

Jeremy was sent to Gellsburg penitentiary. When Triggs and Knight were campaigning their prison initiative, there wasn’t anyone to urge for clemency on Jeremy’s behalf, as he’d eaten them all. As a result, he became one of the first twenty inmates.

Jackson says, “Why do you call yourself Gregor, brother?”

“I cast off the shackles of the outside world when I entered my new one.” Gregor sweeps his hands around the tribe. “We all adopt new names. It is part of the initiation.”

Two tribe members return from the arena floor, dragging something that glistens wetly in the dim light. Jackson notes, without a hint of pity, it is Pierre. The Frenchman’s body is pocked with ugly red divots. It looks like he’s been swimming laps in a piranha tank.

“Why do you eat others?” Jackson says. “Do the guards not feed you? Are they so barbaric?”

“At first it was a necessity. Now it is a pleasure.” Gregor points to a hatch in the dome roof. “Anyway, the savages control the sky-meat.”

“Sky-meat?”

“The watchers drop meat from the sky. There is perhaps enough for everyone, but they,” he gestures to the third tier, “take it all for themselves. The watchers know,” gesturing now to the cameras, “but they want us to kill for the sky-meat or die of hunger. But we’ve outfoxed them.” He smiles, revealing dual rows of sharkish teeth. “We are slyboots, we are.”

“But, this, this is,” disgust etches the sharp angles of Jackson’s face, “ungodly.”

“Your taste will soon turn…or you shall become meat.”

“Meat?”

“Like him.” Gregor points at Pierre. “Those who do not feed become food.”

Jackson took in the faces that surrounded him. He saw the same blind devotion he’d seen in his disciples as Eden Revisited, the same willingness to be led by someone, anyone.

“Good my brothers,” he addresses them in his dulcet preacher’s tone. “I see what we must do. I understand your cravings. It is not your fault you must subsist on unnatural—”

“What’s your name?” Gregor interrupts.

“Jackson. Jackson Cantrell.”

“And what will your new name be?”

“But…it’s the name I was christened with.”

Gregor pulls something from the folds of is robe. Flat, rectangular, cross-hatched metal. A file. “What…will…your…new…name…be?” The slap of the file on the flat of his palm provides a point of emphasis on each word.

Jackson’s self-preservation instinct kicks in. “Messiah,” he says quickly. “Call me Messiah.”

Gregor smiles. “Welcome to the Skineaters, Messiah.”

The others start to whisper: Messiah, Messiah, Messiah.

“Thank you, brothers. And I shall be your Messiah. Trust in me and I shall—”

Hands grab at his arms and legs. Several Skineaters drag the preacher into a chair and hold him there.

“Judas Iscariot, w-wuh-what are you doing?”

Someone clamps his skull in a vice-like embrace. Gregor balances the file between his thumb and index finger as if it were a precision surgical instrument.

“You have taken a new name, and that is half the initiation. The easy part, I’m afraid.”

Someone’s fingers are in his mouth, prying his jaw open. A metal rod is nocked between his teeth and prized backwards until the metal is flush against the intersection where his jawbone meets his skull. His lips are pulled taut, the skin shiny as patent leather, every tooth fully exposed.

“Eer Od!” Jackson screams around the metal. “Ooo! Ooo!”

“Hold steady,” Gregor tells him. “This is liable to…sting.”

He rakes the rusted file across Jackson’s teeth, ruining a perfect dental record in one stroke. Jackson squeals and bucks against his captors. His mouth is aflame; it feels like a bone-saw is tracing the curve of an exposed vertebrae. Enamel dust sifts onto his tongue and coats the back of his throat. Jackson bites down convulsively and shatters his molars against the metal bit and then he’s choking, pitifully, on his own teeth-shards.

Again and again, back and forth, side to side, the tool grinds. The sound it makes is unique, tshy-tshy-tshy, a sanding disk run across a cinderblock, or a very dull knife pressed to a very rough whetstone. Jackson’s nerve centers explode with overstimulation and pain, white-hot and fibrous, yo-yos up and down his spine, roars through his shoulders, through his neck, until it feels like it’s going to rip the top of his head off.

It will be hours before each tooth is honed to a fine point. Gregor is a perfectionist.

The preacher’s screams echo off the Coliseum roof. The sound is a familiar one.

And, somewhere beneath the sound of screaming, deep in the arena’s bowels, there are other sounds.

Scratching. The determined, endless, mindless scratching of fingernails on rock.

And laughter. High, sweet, childlike laughter.

««—»»

“Psst, buddy. Get up.”

Albert Rose has aged exponentially in the months following the killing of his wife’s lover. The sight of his sweet, loving Pamela taking the stand and pointing a manicured finger, calling him a degenerate, an animal, a fiend…it had killed something deep inside him, snuffed a trembling flame. Now just a shell remains: Only the flesh, and bone, and blood.

Now this hand on his shoulder and a sandpapery voice saying, “Stay here much longer, pal, the buzzards gonna tear you up.”

Albert looks up at the man. He looks impossibly old. His face is carved with deep-cutting wrinkles over his forehead and cheeks. Hair frames his features in a wispy silver cowl. His deep-set eyes are so milky Albert wonders if he is cataracted. The man’s body is so scrawny it appears to be made of twisted coat-hangers, every square inch of visible skin badly scabbed. His yellow uniform is stained with sweat and blood and other fluids. He offers a rag-wrapped hand. “Quickly.” His eyes scan the arena floor. “Or you’re dead.”

“Who are you?”

“The only person who cares if you live or die. And only slightly.”

“Where are you taking me?”

The man turns and walks away. “You ask too many questions.”

“No, wait,” Albert struggles to his feet. “I’ll come.”

The first-level concession area was once lined with framed photographs of hockey legends—Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Maurice Richard. Now their faces scatter the floor, scuffed with boot prints and stains of unknown origin. Gretzky’s eyes have been punched out and a dried substance—mayonnaise or semen, most likely the latter— glazes his mouth. The glass he was once encased in has been broken into shards to make shivs. Overhead halogens flicker fitfully, bathing the debris-strewn hallway in intermittent flash-flares. Gaunt, pink-tailed creatures scurry amidst the refuse, black noses twitching.

“Everything starves in here,” the man says dourly. “Even the rats.”

They pass a concession stand. At one time it was busy with paper-hatted workers serving foil-wrapped redhots and mustard-slathered pretzels and ice cold beer. Now it is darkly silent, the formica countertop cracked like a dry riverbed. A prolonged rasping cough emanates from the blackness.

“Buzzards all over the place” the man says. “Cut your throat for tribute.”

“Trib—?”

“Shshsh. In here.”

They duck into a darkened alcove. The room is large, high-ceilinged, and dim. Smells: Mildew, rotting food, feces. The floor tiles are slippery with clotted filth. A row of standing urinals, porcelain hulls rendered parchment-yellow with age and neglect. Somewhere water is dripping, dripping, dripping in the darkness.

“Men’s restroom,” the man says. “My territory.”

A sodden strip of particleboard is laid down in the corner. They sit.

“Don’t people come here?” Albert asks. “To…to do their business?”

The man snorts. “We go where we please. Hell, sometimes I pinch a loaf where someone’ll slip on it…maybe break their neck. What’s your name?”

“Albert Rose.”

“Charlie Henried.”

Albert extends his hand. Charlie’s hands stay in his pockets. Albert’s hand withdraws.

“I figure you want to know about this place, hmm?”

“I suppose so.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” Albert considers. “What goes on in here?”

“Ever done time?”

Albert shakes his head.

“Didn’t think so. This place is the same as any other prison, ’cept everything goes down on a higher level. In a regular super-max you can shoot your mouth off, even hit another inmate and live, because the screws are always there to break things up. Here, you hit anybody, trash-mouth anybody, you’re playing with your life. Most of us stick to the shadows and try to serve our time quietly.”

“What about the others? The gangs?”

“There are two: Skineaters and Baboon Boys.” Charlie shrugs. “You in one, you eat. Either the sky-meat or your fellow inmates, but you eat. If not, you’re a buzzard, you pay tribute and feed off the scrap-heap. It’s that simple.”

Charlie pries up a grotty floor tile and produces a chunk of bread he’s stashed underneath. The bread is alive with mold: Veins of green fungus crisscross its surface. Something is terribly wrong with Charlie’s fingers and the bread falls from them to roll across the shit-slicked floor.

“Goddamn!”

He picks it up. Al notices the bread is denser, moister. Charlie wipes it on his overalls and raises it to his mouth. He sucks greedily, like an infant. His old toothless mouth is drawn in, reminding Al of a tomato that has been hollowed out and then left on a kitchen counter for a stretch of days. Brownish rivulets course down his chin.

“I’d offer you some,” he says. “But you don’t know what I went through to get it.”

“That’s all right.”

Charlie finishes and says, “So what landed you here?”

“I killed someone.”

“What—just one?”

“Yes.”

“A kid?”

Albert shakes his head.

“Chick?”

Another shake.

“You torture him?”

“Blew his head off with a shotgun.”

“First degree?”

“Second.”

“That’s small fry,” The old man says. “What in the Lord’s name are you doing here?”

“The man I killed. He was important.”

“Corporate bigwig important? Prime Minister important? Mother-fucking-Theresa important?”

“His name was Alvin Triggs.”

“Oh, shit. Any relation to Premier Henry Triggs?”

“Son.”

“You killed the wrong guy, friend.” Charlie shakes his head. “The wrong fucking guy.”

“I didn’t even know. Caught him sleeping with my wife.”

“You mean—?”

“In bed together.”

“Shit. What are you gonna do?”

“Wish the jury felt that way.”

“Jury–shmury. You iced Henry Triggs’ boy. You’d be coming here one way or another.”

They sit and listen to water dripping off exposed copper pipes. A man is screaming somewhere. He has been screaming for a long time.

“What landed you here?”

“Killed a few folks. Few too many, I suppose. You know how it is. Politics.”

For Charlie Henried it had started out with some harmless cross-dressing: Lace underwear and costume jewelry, an underwired bustier and six-inch stiletto heels. Innocent experimentation. Until one afternoon his wife found him wearing a plaid schoolgirl uniform with his hair in a sloppy ponytail, jacking off into a pair of her pantyhose. For Charlie—a tobacco-chewing, strip-bar frequenting man’s man—the sight of his wife’s disgusted accusation was too much to bear. He wrapped the come-soaked pantyhose around her neck and applied pressure until her face turned purple and blood squirted from places it had no business squirting from.

It was a liberating experience. After working a shift riveting girders on a skyscraper skeleton, he’d doll himself up in neon stretch-pants and body-glitter and dance the night away at  clubs with names like Rod’s or The Tool Shed or The Cockpit. He loved working the dance floor, pressing his body into another man, grinding cock-to-cock or ass-to-ass. He loved drinking daiquiris or pina coladas or green grasshoppers, loved tongue-fucking maraschino cherries while some potato-masher rubbed the crotch of his sequined pants.

But when he returned to work and stood drinking a cup of morning gutrot amongst men who drove pick-ups and knew the lyrics to every Waylon Jennings song and wolf-whistled at passing ladies…well, he’d feel like an imposter in the cult of masculinity. Can they smell it on me? he wondered. The cheap perfume and baby powder, the trace of K-Y Jelly frosting my bunghole? Guilt led to frustration, frustration mounted to anger, anger spiraled into thoughts of revenge.

But against whom?

Stashed under the bed, his wife’s body was starting to smell pretty ripe…

The first faggot he killed was Billie Goldfarb, a wispy little thing who frequented a club called The Manhole. Charlie took him to a no-tell joint off the highway. They showered together. Charlie let the kid lube his cock with cheap motel soap and suck on it. They rolled around in bed for awhile. Billie tongued Charlie’s asshole. It didn’t feel too bad, actually. Squelchy.

“Gonna tie you up,” Charlie said.

Billie had the slim, hairless body of a child. His erect cock poked above the sheets like a compass needle. “Never done that before.”

Charlie said, “You’ll like it.”

“Aren’t we kin-ky.”

Charlie went to his truck and returned with a toolbox. He tied Billie to the bedposts with loops of clothesline. Billie’s eyes widened when Charlie duct-taped his mouth shut.

They damn near exploded when Charlie pulled out the Makita power sander.

“You faggots are so damn bumpy,” Charlie growled. “I’ll smooth you out.”

Charlie revved the Makita to a good 5000 rpm before grinding it between Billie’s legs. It was outfitted with 10-grit paper: The equivalent of gravel glued to a sanding disk. Blood and skin spat like sparks to spatter the sheets in a mad spiral, then a burnt-toast smell as the little fag’s pubes were friction-incinerated. Charlie squashed Billie’s nuts against the whirling disk and felt them diminish in his hand. By the time he let off, Billie’s tackle was like the Aztecs: Ancient-fucking-history. Billie had gone stiff by then, every muscle rigid, his crotch a confusion of tattered skin-flaps and tiny frayed tubes and jellied flesh and dark-red blood.

“Like the guy on TV says,” Charlie said. “Wait, there’s more!”

He got a soldering gun good and hot and jammed it down Billie’s urethra. The kid bronco-bucked, his bound wrists snapping like spring saplings. Charlie crammed the gun in until the searing metal disappeared into Billie’s abdomen and left it jutting there. Next he took a pair of needlenose pliers and tore the kid’s eyelids off. He stuffed the bloody tats of skin and hair up Billie’s nose, poking them up each nostril until his sinus cavity was stuffed full of eyelid. Charlie looked at the sad thing writhing on the bloody bed and the only emotions he felt were revulsion and rage.

He grabbed a Stanley Antivibe hammer and a box-cutter and, with a dexterity that surprised him, traced every one of the faggot’s teeth with the razor, cutting deep into the gums, before smashing them out with a well-placed hammer stroke. It was tricky work: Blood was spraying everywhere, splattering the ceiling and curtains and his face, and the kid was thrashing around a lot. Satisfied with his handiwork, Charlie reached into Billie’s mouth with the pliers. The kid shook, protesting, biting down with his toothless, old-man mouth. Charlie seized the red bulb of his epiglottis and tore it out and then blood was flowing unimpeded into Billie’s lungs; his epiglottis looked like a tiny tongue clutched between the plier-jaws and Charlie rubbed it over his cock before throwing it at the wall, where it stuck for a moment before sliding to the carpet.

A brown, syrupy discharge jetted from Billie’s asshole that smelled very bad. This only angered Charlie further. He whacked the kid’s skull with the hammer, high, near the temple, and the impact caused his left eyeball to rocket from its smashed socket; it bobbed against his cheek by its glistening stalk like a paddle-ball. Charlie squished it between his fingers—it felt a little bit like a cocktail onion—and smeared the warm jelly on his cock, the stimulation of which caused him to ejaculate furiously. Billie somehow summoned the energy to cry, and his remaining eye rolled back in some kind of horrible dream-state.

The sight of the poor kid crying and that one crazy, lazy eye rolling about had filled Charlie with a momentary pity.

Then he poked it out, casually, with a leather punch.

Presto! A second wind!

Charlie cut the restraints with the box-cutter. He flipped Billie over, pinned a knee between his shoulders, and slashed a deep ring around the crinkled balloon-knot of his anus. Billie’s cornhole popped up like a cork from a champagne bottle. Yee–HA! Charlie pinched it off with a pair of Vise Grips.

“Okay, fag,” he whispered. “I had my fun. You can go.”

Billie staggered toward the door with the soldering gun projecting from his crotch. Charlie held the Vise Grips tightly and Billie’s guts uncoiled from his asshole like colored scarves from a magician’s sleeve. Charlie had a good laugh at that.

Billie kept going and his sticky viscera dragged across the carpet. He was halfway out the door when he ran out of intestine. He continued to strain in the manner of a dog against a short leash. He was saying things through that busted mouth, insensible things, although Charlie thought he heard him call out for his mother, then for someone named “Petey.” He opened his mouth and a huge sack of blood fell out, dark red and reeking, onto the orange shag. Charlie let go of the Vise Grips and Billie fell forward, unbalanced, toppling off the second-storey balcony. His guts followed him down to land atop his deflated belly in milky-wet coils.

Staring down at the mess of Billie’s body, Charlie found brief peace.

He found peace twelve more times before the cops caught him.

His house was searched, the putrefying remains of his wife located.

Charlie stood trial for fourteen counts of first-degree murder.

The jury convicted him on every count.

The hardest part for him—worse than the recriminations of his wife’s family, worse than seeing his depravities splashed over the national newspapers—was having his old construction pals watch as he was led away. Charlie knew they didn’t see the yellow prison overalls or the cast-iron shackles: They saw him in a pink taffeta dress, sheer nylons, spike-toed heels, his hair plaited in braids. A Sugarplum Fairy. He almost cried.

Albert says, “Is there anything I should be careful of?”

“Only everything,” Charlie replies. “Find a spot and defend it as best you can. Make damn sure you’re out of sight when the Skineaters make a meat run.”

“A meat run?”

“The Skineaters eat…well, skin. That’s you and me. When they run low the tribe goes hunting. They find you first, you’re the meat.”

“Jesus.”

“Not in here.”

“Is anywhere safe?”

Charlie hisses through his teeth. “Tough call, son. Can’t say there is… although there’s one place that might be safe. Nobody has the stones to check it out.”

“Where?”

“Basement.”

“The basement? Why?”

Charlie waves a rag-swaddled hand around his head, as if to shoo away a fly. “This went down before my time, but I’ll tell you what I know. The first bunch of guys who came here were the worst—Christ, they were the reason this fucking place was built, right? Now only three of them are left: Edward, leader of the Baboon Boys; Jeremy, leader of the Skineaters…and another.”

“Who?”

“His name…her name…its name…hell, I dunno…is Lazarus. Lazarus Cranston.”

“What do you mean, its name?”

Charlie runs a hand over his groin. “He…her…whatever…is one of them men-ladies.”

“You mean a transvestite?”

“No!” the old man snaps. “Like, all mixed up. Men parts, women parts—a big stew of parts.”

“A hermaphrodite?”

“Christ, listen to mister-fucking-dictionary over there. Yeah, sure, one of them. Anyway, what I hear, this fella was a sight to behold: the old-timers talk like he was Paul Bunyan, head-in-the-clouds kind of huge. Edward and Jeremy are the big Kahunas now, but when Lazarus was topside, their M.O. was same as everyone else’s: Steer clear, stay alive.”

“What happened to him?”

“First he killed half the inmates. If you crossed his path or looked at him cock-eyed he’d snuff you, and nasty: Bash your head against the wall or toss you over the balcony, maybe snap every bone in your body and leave you to starve.”

A sound of grinding gears from the roof, followed by savage hoots from the upper tier.

“That sound,” Charlie cocks his head. “Means they’re dropping the sky-meat.”

“Why don’t you get some?”

“Not that easy.”

“Why not?”

Charlie just grunts. “Anyway, Lazarus, one day he’s gone. Told Edward he was going down to the basement to tunnel out. He took two prisoners with him: Just hooked them under his arms like they were fucking kindling and dragged them down into the dark.” Charlie shudders. “That’s where he is. Down in the basement. Digging.”

“Does anyone see him?”

“Nope. The guy must be fucking albino by now.” He pauses. “But I hear him sometimes. At night. This sound, this scritch-scritch-scritch, like nails on a chalkboard. And…other noises.”

“Other noises?”

Charlie leans in. He whispers, as if to speak overloud would rouse a sleeping beast. “Some nights, when things get real quiet, swear I hear…crying. Like a squalling baby.” A shrug. “Listen, you’re talking to an old man. I’m hearing things, maybe.”

Sound from the darkened concession stand: A wet-stick snap followed by a muffled groan. Then footsteps plodding up the stairwell.

“Someone just made tribute,” Charlie says. “Going to barter for a shred of sky-meat.”

“What do you mean?”

Charlie holds his hands out to Albert. The blood-soaked rags are unfurling in wet strings.

“Help me off with them.”

Albert peels the covering from Charlie’s hands.

“Oh my God…”

“This is tribute, son.”

Most of Charlie’s fingers are missing. The crudely hacked-at stumps weep thick yellow pus. The tips are the mottled gangrene-green of a rotting potato.

“Edward takes our body as currency. We give him pieces of ourselves, he repays us with pieces of bread and meat. If you want to eat, to live, you must sacrifice yourself.”

“That’s horrific.”

“It’s like the warlords used to do in feudal Japan. When you defeated an enemy, you’d make him cut off the little finger on each hand.”

“Why?”

“Because he couldn’t heft a sword properly afterwards. All his strength was gone. He was no threat to you, then.” Charlie passes a malformed hand through his greasy hair to show Albert the butchered remains of his left ear. “I wedged it in a door jamb and tore it off. Edward gave me two loaves of bread and added it to his treasure chest.”

Albert’s mind rebels at the mental picture of Edward’s “treasure chest” of rotting spare parts. “I couldn’t do…I won’t do that.”

Charlie laughs softly in the gloom. “Get hungry enough, son, you will. Get hungry enough…you’ll do anything.”

««—»»

“How’s it looking in there?”

The Master Guard seats himself on a swivel chair in the control room. He siphons unfiltered cigarette smoke into his lungs and blows twin streams of bluish smoke out his nostrils. The nightwatch guard fills him in on the latest news.

“Looks like Cantrell’s been adopted by Hanson’s group.”

“And a new Skineater is born.”

“Inmate Ruddock went off with inmate Tonnere’s crew.”

“Dumbass Ed invited the wolf back to the hencoop.”

“Rose disappeared with Chuck Henried.”

“The cross-dresser? Not quite a blue-chip connection.”

The Master Guard stares at the few remaining monitors. Nothing moves save a few inkblot rats foraging the grime-streaked floor.

“Calm before the storm.”

“Sir?”

“Remember your high school chemistry, kid? How an inert chemical can maintain a state of suspended hyper-activity? It’s like that,” he points at the screens, “in there. All you need is one combustible element—acid to base, match to kindling—and boom. Everything blows sky-high.”

“I guess so, sir.” Sometimes the young man thinks his boss belongs in a classroom, expounding on the intricacies of the sciences, instead of overseeing the day-to-day operation of the most inhumane institution in the free world.

“Calm before the storm, kid.” Shadows twist within themselves under the Coliseum’s dark dome, such strange mysteries birthing themselves anew. “Calm before the fucking storm.”

— | — | —

IV. CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Harlan waits two days before stealing Edward’s sight.

The Baboon Boy leader sleeps on the topmost row of seats. Lester Biggs, a skinny, weasel-faced man stands sentinel. Harlan mounts the stairs silently.

“I’m going to have a word with Edward.”

Lester’s body uncoils like a cobra from a fakir’s basket. “Don’t think so, Lurch.”

“I’m talking to Edward, Lester. Want to move, fine. If not…”

“That so?” Lester pulls a double-pronged blade. “I suggest you get ta steppin’, little doggie, before this big dog starts chewin’ on your—”

Earlier that day, Harlan had torn a length of railing-pipe off a stairwell. It was a good three inches in diameter, solid steel, blue paint chipping off its surface. The metal bar now materializes from behind Harlan’s back, slices through the air in a hard downward orbit, embedding itself in Lester’s head. A sound like a shellacked egg cracking as cold iron buries into twitching gray-matter. Lester’s mouths falls open and a Vesuvius-like torrent of blood gouts around the railing’s curved side. His eyes blink, rapidly. He topples forward, bare feet rat-a-tat-tatting on the concrete.

“Hey,” Harlan slaps Edward’s stubbled cheek. “Wake up, Ed.”

After years in the Coliseum, Edward has learned to sleep with one eye open. Still feigning slumber, he reaches underneath the seat and closes his hand around a wedge of glass. He brings the weapon around, aiming for Harlan’s neck. Harlan feints left. The shank whickers past to leave a shallow gash along his throat. He snares Edward’s hand as it passes, closing his own bear-paw-sized mitt around it.

“That wasn’t very sporting, Ed.”

Harlan squeezes Edward’s hand with sufficient force to compress a lump of coal into a diamond. Glass cuts into Edward’s flesh, slicing through tendon and muscle. Then it shatters and Edward’s severed fingers fall to the floor, wriggling like plump inchworms in the dim light.

“This is just politics,” Harlan says, holding Edward down with no more effort than it would require to subdue an excitable child. “Nothing personal.”

Harlan had taken the Master Guard’s advice: He went on a scavenger hunt. He found everything he needed in the equipment wing: A length of copper wire and a pair of insulated rubber gloves. He hooks the copper wire through the roof’s electrified mesh, infusing it with 150 pulsating volts.

“Hold still.”

Harlan guides the wire over the contorted landscape of Edward’s face, leaving a contrail of seared flesh and a smell like barbecued pork. Edward presses his eyelids shut but Harlan jabs the tip through this slim defense. Electrified metal slides into soft corneal jelly. Edward’s eye explodes behind the closed lid and flecks of superheated pulp burst between the fleshy slit. With nothing to support it, the eyelid caves into the empty socket. Edward mewls like a drowning kitten and his hands reach up blindly to paw at his attacker’s face. Eye-gelatin drools down his face like gummy red alligator tears. Harlan rakes the wire over the bridge of Edward’s nose and detonates the neighboring eye. Edward’s screams ricochet across the arena.

“Oh, J-Juh-Jesus,” Edward trembles. “D-duh-don’t kill me!”

“I won’t do that,” Harlan promises. “I’ll find a use for you.”

“T-th-thuh-thank you,” Edward reaches into the tribute hamper and places a percussion grenade in Harlan’s hand. “I found it years ago; take it, take it…”

Harlan leaves Edward to his blindness. He walks through his new army, staring at each man until they drop their eyes in supplication. He reaches the tier edge and stares down over the parapet. The Skineaters feast in silence below.

Coming, Harlan stares down at the corpse-white men in purple robes. Coming for you.

««—»»

Jackson’s mouth aches. He appraises his face in a fragment of reflective metal, wincing at the sight of his needlelike teeth.

The Lord keep and comfort me, the Lord absolve me of sin…

Even while suffering the indignity of body modification, tears of pain and humiliation rolling down his trembling cheeks, Jackson was thinking:

How can I sway the flock? How can I command?

“Gregor, dear brother. Come here for a moment.”

The Skineater leader sets aside a knuckle of flesh-strung bone. “What is it, Messiah?”

“Tell me about this place. Tell me why we are second class.”

Gregor wipes a red sheen from his lips. “Is it any different from the outside world? There are weak and there are strong. We are feared by many, but those men—” pointing upwards, “—command the sky-meat. We cannot grow, cannot gain strength, because we must always cull our numbers. Until we overthrow those who keep their heels on our throats, we will remain second class.”

When preaching at Eden Revisited, his disciples used to say the light of God shone through Jackson Cantrell’s eyes. Of course, it was a ruse: He applied reflective contact lenses before each sermon. Nevertheless, he stares at Gregor with fervent intensity as his voice rises to an impassioned baritone. “Why must this be, my good brother? Are we not men, equal in God’s eyes? Must we suffer as slaves under the yoke of deviants? Must the Lord’s will be perverted by such base heathens?”

Some tribe members turn their backs, or mutter shut up under their breaths. But others turn to him, entranced, as so many have been, by his galvanic oratory. Jackson senses their interest like a shark smells blood in the water.

“I look at you all and see hidden strength and simmering rage. I watch you watch the men who keep you down. They eat like kings while we—” he stabs a finger at the bloated corpse of Pierre Laframboise, “—must sate ourselves on our kin of kin! Why, brothers, why?”

“Nothing wrong with what we eat,” Gregor says moodily. “Lots of…vitamins.”

“Yeeesss,” Jackson replies, always the democrat. “Although new to your tribe, I too savor the taste of good brother Pierre.” Jackson plucks a shred of lung-meat from Pierre’s hollowed-out torso, popping it into his mouth and chewing with slow determination. “But such ambrosia should be sacred, not eaten simply to fuel our bodies. We should have—we deserve—our share of the sky-meat!”

More men turn. They regard Jackson with a look he has come to recognize: Abject hopefulness, an aching need to believe. Jackson throws his arms wide as his voice climbs to pulpit-pitch. “Brothers, why do we remain in exile while the promised land is within our grasp? I have seen the men who keep us down—they are primitives! Why do we prostrate ourselves to such beasts?”

“Yeah!” a voice from the back cries. “I want my share!”

“We all want our share, brother! I say we take what is ours!”

“But how?” Gregor says. “They are stronger than us. If we go to war, many will die.”

“True,” Jackson says. “But when Jesus was hung on the cross, he suffered so mankind might thrive. So should it be with us—those who die shall be celebrated as heroes! A small sacrifice for divine justice!”

“Justice!” A man stands with a crude metal club in his hands. “Justice for all!”

“We all want justice, don’t we?”

“Yes!” A chorus of voices respond.

“The time for purging has arrived, brothers! Who shall join this crusade?”

More men stand. They brandish metal bars and shivs and lengths of razor garrote-wire.

“Yes my people,” Jackson nods. “Together we can reclaim what is ours. Reclaim what the Holy Father gives to all His creatures: Respect, dignity, equality.” He smiles, mouth a wall of serrated ivory. “Tonight we feast on brother Pierre—tomorrow we dine on savage hearts!”

Another cheer, near-deafening.

The smiling preacher senses confidence in the men’s faces, in their bodies, in their souls.

These men will die. Die for the cause. Die…for me.

The thought affords Jackson Cantrell great peace.

His eyes wander to the upper tier. A man—the lumbering wretch he was recently incarcerated with, in fact—stares down, his massive arms steadied on the balcony rail.

Coming, Jackson thinks. Coming for you.

««—»»

Get hungry enough, you’ll do anything…

Albert has shared Charlie’s bathroom for the past two days. They sit on the floor in cross-legged yogi position, slipping in and out of consciousness while the heating pipes moan and rattle above. Albert asks questions. Charlie answers them as best he can.

“What’s that noise?”

“Rats.”

“How did you loose your toes?”

“Rats.”

“When people die, what happens to the bodies?”

A sigh. “Rats.”

A body learns to cope without food. The stomach shrinks and limbs atrophy, hair and fingernails fall out, gums recede and anemia sets in as, finally, one’s organs cease to function properly. Wounds turn septic and the body begins to rot from the inside-out like an old jack-o-lantern. The Coliseum buzzards must bear this daily destruction of their bodies, the incremental loss of strength, vision, hearing, and willpower.

Their world narrows to a tiny pinprick of intent: Eat. Feed. Survive.

Charlie has been imprisoned for five years. But Coliseum time bears no resemblance to real time. He is fifty but looks much older. His body has been ravaged by the sleepless nights and constant fear, the mind-numbing violence and repetitive self-mutilation. He is not the same man who worked the high steel, the same animal who murdered willowy faggots in seedy motel rooms. That man—his vigor, his rage, his savagery—is dead. All that remains is a dead soul in a sagging casement struggling through another day.

Get hungry enough, you’ll do anything…

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Must be nice.” Charlie’s starvation-wracked body hasn’t produced anything more substantial than a walnut-sized turd in years.

“Where do I go?”

“Anywhere you want.”

“What about the stalls?”

“Be my guest.”

The stall dividers are crimped sheet metal dotted with clods of caked excrement. The toilet is the color of melted butter, a thin fissure running down the bowl’s curve from which brackish water seeps. Shit-fattened bluebottles hover in search of warm mounds to deposit their eggs-sacs in. Albert steps closer.

“Dear Christ,” he gags.

The bowl brims with putrefied human waste, surface the mottled brown of a rotten banana. The excrement-skin is hard enough for insects—sinuous, segmented millipedes—to scurry over its surface, digging burrows through the flaking feces.

Charlie waits until Albert is inside the stall before creeping to his feet. He has learned to live by the law of the jungle: Kill, eat, or die. He does not care for Albert one way or another: In the Coliseum, compassion is a luxury nobody can afford. The old man imagines Albert’s body stashed in a safe place…imagines shaving pieces off the corpse and pawning flesh as tribute… fatting himself on fragments of pitiful Albert Rose. He’d be doing him a favor, really: A quick, relatively painless death as opposed to the dismal existence of a buzzard.

Hungry enough, do anything…

“I can’t go in here, Char—”

A concussive blow to the skull sends Albert face-first into the toilet. His head breaks through crusted shit, submerging neck-deep in warm brown soup. Millipedes scurrying through his hair, peppering his scalp with poisonous stings. His hands are braced on the floor. Grime squirts between fingers.

“Be still, be still,” Charlie pushes Albert’s head deeper into the bowl. “Breathe, breathe.”

Acid-ferment bites at Albert’s eyes. His lungs burn for air. Charlie reaches between his legs and gives his balls a wrenching twist. Albert screams and his mouth fills with stagnant shit-water. Clumps and flakes of feces smear his lips and teeth and tongue. His sphincter unclenches and a tropical rainstorm of shit issues from his asshole to slick the seat of his overalls. He pushes backwards frantically, trying to pull his head clear.

“Goddamn it,” Charlie hisses. “Stay down! Die!”

Albert fires a mule-kick up into Charlie’s balls. The old man wheezes but keeps the pressure on. Another shot to the nuts and he staggers away. Albert pulls his head out of the toilet and looses an explosive stream of vomit. Shit is clumped in his hair and streaks his face like war-paint. “You,” Albert gasps. “You fucker!”

“You don’t know what it’s like in here, son. Every man for his goddamn self.”

“Tried to kill me!”

“Easy, son, easy.”

Charlie’s weapon is a crude one: A sharpened nail pounded into a wooden doorstop. He keeps it hidden in a back pocket, close at hand. “You’d a done the same, son,” he says. “Hell, I was doing you a favor.”

“Sick bastard!”

Albert grabs at Charlie, fingers digging deep grooves into his shoulders. “You prick you prick you prick,” he’s saying.

The old man stabs upward with the shiv, aiming for Albert’s neck. Albert ducks right and wraps his hands around the weapon. They fall to the floor. A gagging sound, then a sound like an awl punching through soft leather. This is followed by a windless wheezing noise.

Albert rises. The doorstop protrudes from Charlie’s lower jaw like a wooden goatee, eight inches of ten-penny nail thrust into his head. Albert can see the column of cold metal glinting though the old man’s unhinged mouth.

Charlie’s scrawny body slamdances on the floor, arms flailing, legs thrashing about. Blood hemorrhages from various orifices to spread across the tiles. Charlie’s clawing at his throat, trying to let some air in, but his lungs are full of blood and he only succeeds in tearing ribbons of skin off his neck and throat with the bony stumps of his fingers, leaving greenish snail-trails on his skin.

“Oh, Jesus,” Albert whispers. “Oh, Jesus Christ…”

He stumbles out of the bathroom.

To his left: Stairs leading down.

Into the basement.

— | — | —

V. CANNIBAL CATS WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT

Perhaps it is night, perhaps morning. Beneath the cold, black dome it is impossible to tell. Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes blend together, an interminable expanse of time.

The time is now.

“Come, brothers.” Jackson moves through his tribe, patting backs, kneading shoulders, whispering words of encouragement. “Let us take back what is ours.”

Up the stairs they go. Their boneflint hands clasp steel bars and metal spurs and gauze-wrapped slivers of glass. Their route takes them past starvation-addled buzzards huddled in corners and lying atop heating grates, all of them marinating in their own stench and depression. Jackson leads, a saw-toothed pied piper bolstering his lemmings’ mettle.

“Like David unto Goliath, brothers, so shall we slay the cruel tyrant with a sling of righteousness!”

Harlan hears them coming. He cocks his head, dog-like, trying to guess their numbers. Soon the Baboon Boys rise. Harlan grunts and the men scurry to their hovels, awkward in their nakedness, flaccid penises whipping to and fro. They arm themselves with crude weapons and furious invective:

“—fuckin’ flesh-eating freaks think they can come up here—”

“—gonna smash their bald heads to powder—”

“—dead, dead, dead, motherfuckin’ dead—”

The Skineaters charge hard, shouting absurd mantras:

“—reclaim the promised land—”

“—and justice for all—”

“—Do it for Pierre! For Pierre! For Pieeeeerre!—”

They meet outside the Baboon Boys’ perimeter, Jackson and Harlan heading their respective tribes. Like Civil War soldiers, they line up against one another between the rows of seats, each man set on a gently curved collision course with his opposite number.

“Where is Edward?” Gregor says, pounding a dented pipe into the meat of his palm.

“Over there.” Harlan points at a humped figure sitting high in the stands. The blind ex-leader looks up, displaying his glistening eyeless sockets and whimpering like a crippled tomcat.

“You see?” Jackson thunders, “what these heathens do? Will we bow to such animals?”

“At least we don’t eat each other!” one of the Baboon Boys shouts, flexing a loop of barbed wire between his fists.

“See how they mock us! See how they throw our necessary crimes back in our faces! Tell us, infidels, why we must eat our own kind?”

“Because you’re sick fucks!” the Baboon Boy says.

“Miscreant!” Jackson slams his foot on the cement, kicking up a cloud of powdered cockroach husks. “You refuse to share the food amongst your brothers! What are we to do— starve?”

“That was the general idea,” the Baboon Boy shrugs. “You all should’ve been dead years ago.” He points at the fulminating preacher. “Who the fuck is this guy? You little pantywaist, Gregor, you lose control?”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Gregor brandishes a thick copper pipe.

“Bring it on, pussy. I’m not your baby brother; you won’t drop me that easy.”

The groups draw closer. Harlan raises his hand.

“Men, I’m sure we can settle this decently.”

“I see Satan in this man,” Jackson says. “I see the fires of hell burning in his eyes! The devil is sly; he has many guises and many deceits!”

The humid air crackles with pent-up electricity.

Just one combustible element…

The roof-hatch opens and a tiny circlet of gray sky appears. The sound of grinding gears as the sky-meat begins its dripping descent.

…and boom—everything blows sky-high.

“That is ours! Take it, my brothers! Kill anyone who dares stop us!”

“That’s how you want it,” Harlan unslings the railing bar from his shoulder. “That’s how you’ll get it.”

««—»»

“Boss,” the young guard says. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

The Master Guard leans over the kid’s shoulder and peers at the grainy black-and-white image.

“Looks like a brawl.” The kid fingers a toggle, focusing the camera lens on the unfolding scene. “The two big groups. Almost every member, I’d say.”

The look on the Master Guard’s face doesn’t suggest compassion, or pity, or frustration: He looks vindicated. “Told you they were gearing up for war in there. Those new fish were the missing ingredients.”

He stares at the screen: A roiling mass of bodies slashing and stabbing and biting. He says, “Going to be a bonanza for the rats come dawn. Get a rough head count after this settles and decrease the food supply accordingly.”

“What do you think they’re fighting over, sir?”

“Men like that?” the Master Guard shakes his head. “Kid, they kill just to remind themselves they’re still breathing.”

««—»»

Gregor is thrusting a skewer of splintered wood into the soft abdominal meat of a Baboon Boy whose face has been chewed half-off when he feels a whickering wind pass between his legs. He stares down at his split nutsack, gonads dangling like a pair of stemmed bing cherries and blood spurting over his milky thighs. He turns to see Byron Covey, a 26-year-old serial pederast, grinning up at him. Byron’s hands clutch a wickedly curved billhook and he slashes again, a quick and deliberate stroke. Gregor’s testicles plop to the floor and tumble down the slight grade, underneath the seats, picking up a sheen of dust as they roll. They come to rest against the parapet’s crook looking like a pair of powdered figs. Gregor’s testicular stems tremble between his legs like antennae. The man who was once Jeremy Hanson falls to his knees. A last sense-memory—warm flesh on his tongue—zigzags across his mind a split-second before Byron buries the billhook in his neck…

Edward Tonnere cowers beneath the seats while the battle rages. He does not hear Jackson Cantrell sneak up beside him, or see the sharpened piston-rod in the preacher’s hand. But Edward feels it when the piston-rod is jammed into the waxy canal of his ear, feels his eardrum detonate with an internal sigh, feels Jackson’s hands steadying his head as blood explodes from the erupted chasm and trickles down the arc of his throat. Finally, he feels dim pressure as Jackson kicks the piston-rod with a booted foot, pounding it into Edward’s eyeless skull like a tent peg into dense clay…

Harlan wades through the stands, loosing the railing bar with a Hank Aaron homerun swing, smashing bones and shattering cartilage, pulping flesh and snuffing lives. Emboldened by Jackson’s dogma, a wild-eyed Skineater rushes the man-mountain. Harlan chops down with all his Herculean strength and the Skineater’s jawbone sails end-over-end through the air and lands, a chalk-white crescent moon spider-skittering across the floor. Tattered flesh hanging from his cheeks, the Skineater drops, shocked, searching for his missing jaw like a man who’s lost a contact lens. Harlan rams the blood-spattered bar through his skull…

Like an earthquake or a flash-flood or a forest fire, the battle rages fast and furious. A natural disaster on a miniature scale, one that will leave no grieving populace or relief funds in its wake. Thirty-eight men are killed or lay dying in the span of twenty minutes. The stands are slathered with blood and chunks of flesh, organs lying in glistening dollops on the floor. Hacked limbs lay scattered about, giving the battlefield the appearance of a haphazardly-organized mannequin warehouse. Many seat-backs are hung with scraps of torn skin and cupped rags of scalp. A Skineater with a wickedly-sharp skate blade protruding from his throat clutches a wooden pike with a Baboon Boy’s head impaled upon it.

Harlan stands amidst the carnage, clad head-to-toe in gore. He walks amongst the dying to crush the life out of those whose feeble struggles continue.

After killing Edward, Jackson had covered himself with the carcass. Now, like a cockroach on the heels of a nuclear holocaust, he scuttles from his hiding place and looks about. Only the man-beast remains.

Samson, Goliath, Lazarus…all had their weaknesses. I must slay the mighty infidel.

Jackson slides the piston-rod from Edward’s ear. It pulls free with the sound of a boot sucked from mud. Jackson creeps down the steps, careful not to slip on clotting blood, flanking Harlan’s blindside.

Look at the size of him, Jackson thinks as Harlan’s impossibly broad back looms before him. Man or monster? He crouches low, cat-like, stepping over Gregor’s mutilated corpse as if he were clearing a mudpuddle.

Ten feet, five feet, two…

Huey singing: It’s hip to be square—da-da-da-nah-nah-nah—so hip to be square…

“I stab at thee, Satan!” Jackson screams as the piston-rod descends in a silvered arc. Harlan grunts as the piston finds a home in the groove of his shoulder-blade, puncturing to a two-inch depth before pinging off his clavicle bone. He wheels, clawing at it like an arrow-stuck grizzly.

“Bad move.” He plucks it out as if no more painful than a bee sting. “Going to cost you.”

“Wait.” Confusion flickers across the preacher’s face: Killing Edward had been so much easier. “Wait a moment, brother. I thought you were going to kill me. I was acting in self defense.”

“Self defense?” Blood pulses between Harlan’s collarbone. “Is that what the pious call stabbing a man in the back nowadays?”

The preacher extends the pointer and index fingers of his left hand in a “V”. He smiles grovelingly. “Peace, my brother.”

Jackson backs up to the balcony. Harlan follows, cutting off the angles, corralling the terrified preacher until his ass rests against the parapet. It’s a fifty-foot drop to the second level. He grabs Jackson’s robe and spins him, bending his upper body over the railing.

“Have mercy, dear brother!”

Harlan notices something glinting on the floor: Small and cylindrical, glossy with blood. The percussion grenade. He remembers what the master guard said: Nothing that’ll kill a man… unless you jam it up his ass.

Harlan looks at the preacher’s sallow buttocks, the grenade, and back.

Why the fuck not?

“Dear God, no!” Jackson hollers as his robe is lifted and a cold tube inserted up his bunghole. “The Lord frowns upon buggery!”

Harlan pulls the pin.

It’s a delayed fuse: Jackson turns as Harlan releases him, fingers clutching at his backside. He grunts like a constipation geezer, squeezing his eyes shut. “This is a terrible indignity,” he gasps, “to treat a man of God in such a manner—”

BOOM.

Jackson’s stomach distends like a cherry-bombed trashcan. This is accompanied by the firecracker-sound of every major bone and vertebrae snapping up and down the preacher’s body. Jackson Cantrell’s skull goes off like a steam whistle, blood and gore spraying from mouth and ears and nose. His eyes bulge out of their sockets to the point where Harlan could clearly see the optic nerves. A second later they exploded with a moist pop. The sound of clattering metal as the spent shell drops from Jackson’s ass is followed by a loose goulash of liquefied organs and splintered bones falling from the shell-hole. Jackson’s body topples over the balcony like a dead leaf. It lands on a plastic chair and the impact sends what’s left of his spine rocketing through the remains of his guts.

Who’s left, Harlan thinks. Who’s next?

He shoulders his weapon and turns from the battlefield.

Searching for undiscovered territory.

««—»»

PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION

Prisoner: 15008 Cranston, Lazarus

Consulting MD: Dr. Adam Coles

Security Designation: Red

July 10, 1995.

Lazarus Cranston is the most terrifying individual I’ve ever met. Apart from the sheer physical dimensions—six-foot-nine, 423 pounds—and well-documented criminal history (78 known murders, at least 30 unsolved cases that he may be responsible for; easily the most prolific serial killer in North American history), Cranston possesses a genius-level IQ. Unlike the others I have profiled, Cranston does not harbor a pathological hatred of society, his parents, women, racial groups, or any other stimuli that frequently drive serial killers to their acts. Cranston kills for the sheer joy the act affords him.

He kills for the simple pleasure of seeing living creatures die.

Cranston had no particular victim or manner of dispatch. The only clear linkage appears to be that the killings were inventive, merciless, and often slow—coroners reports indicate that many victims died over the course of hours, or days, or, in one extraordinary case, months. This, of course, was the infamous Celia Heinz case. Cranston kidnapped the seventeen-year-old Heinz after a high school soccer practice and, in a secluded location, severed each and every one of her appendages, cauterizing the wounds and injecting powerful narcotic cocktails to keep her alive. The only thing she was permitted to consume were the amputated parts of her own body. Investigators found her armless, legless, featureless, yet horribly alive exactly two months to the day she had been abducted. (Those in search of further information should direct themselves to the Niagara Criminal Forensics Archive, Autopsy File A-303.1) His murderous tendencies have not slackened since incarceration. He dispatched his cellmate within an hour of arrival at Fulgate penitentiary, strangled the man to death with a twisted bed sheet.

There is nothing intrinsically good in this individual; not one fiber of Lazarus Cranston’s being reflects the slightest capacity for humanity, or kindness, or compassion. If it is indeed possible that a person can personify perfect, undiluted, dispassionate evil, that person is Lazarus Cranston. I know this may sound both melodramatic and unprofessional, but it is very difficult to maintain professional discipline when discussing such a patient.

For these reasons, it is obvious that Cranston should NEVER be released. As the death penalty was discontinued in 1955, I can only stress that Cranston live the remainder of his life under the tightest security. If, as the newspapers are reporting, a new prison is soon to be erected in the Northwest Territories, I highly recommend he be transferred.

—Dr. Adam Coles

Addendum:

I hazard to add this, as it may render me the laughingstock of the medical community.

I refer to Cranston as “he” only because “it” would cause confusion—although “it” is perhaps a more apt designation, as Lazarus Cranston is hermaphroditic. Unlike most, he is not sterile: Medical examination reveals both penis and vagina, while stunted, do function.

Two weeks ago I was summoned to the solitary confinement wing. The guard had reported strange noises from Cranston’s cell.

He said it sounded like someone crying. But not Cranston himself.

Infantile cries.

Cranston was hunched in the darkness when I first saw him. He was flushing the cell’s commode violently and repeatedly. I asked him what he was doing. He made no reply. I asked him to step away from the toilet. He did not. I summoned the guard and instructed Cranston for the last time to step forward.

He charged at the bars, teeth bared, arms flailing, spitting and gibbering and hissing like some kind of rabid beast. We were all quite taken aback. He was shaking the bars and his knuckles were white around the metal. The following is only speculation: I believe Cranston was frightened.

For the first time since I’d known him. For perhaps the first time in his life.

Terribly frightened.

The guards administered dart-gun sedation and removed Cranston to the infirmary. I requested a moment alone in the cell and approached the commode.

What I saw astounds me to this day.

It was a body. A tiny infant body, dead of drowning.

Not a normal infant.

This child—if that’s what it indeed was—did not appear...natural. Its limbs were long and ropy and somehow primitive. The face had none of the charming cherubic qualities of a healthy baby: Instead it was flat and wizened; it seemed so atrociously old; the body of a newborn with the face of an ancient, and deformed in so many disturbing ways besides. Its lips were thin bloodless slashes between which teeth glinted in needle-ish points; a tongue, narrow and forked as a snake’s, protruded from its slack mouth and its breath smelled like a sick animal’s. It possessed no sexual apparatus to speak of: A smooth sexless groin, the skin pebbled like the rind of a tangerine. It looked so terribly wrong floating in the stainless steel bowl, nightmare limbs outspread. And I could not conceive—my mind shrank away at the notion—of what such a thing might grow up to become.

I wrapped the body in a towel. It possessed that strange weight dead tissue tends to have. I dropped it into a garbage can and covered it with soda cans and candy bar wrappers.

Medically improper, I know. But, you see, I could not bear touching it anymore, couldn’t cradle that dead weight in my arms another second, or stare into those lifeless black eyes…

Good Lord, I was terrified.

Unreasonably, unprofessionally terrified.

— | — | —

VI. SUB-TERRAINIUM

The basement.

Descending the stairs is like entering a tropical forest. The air became dank and the humid air thick as fog. Boxes once filled with skate blades and paper cups and hockey tape are jumbled high, wispy with cobwebs and alive with nesting rats. The darkness is first impenetrable, then invasive: A second skin.

Somewhere in the twisting warren of perspiring concrete and exposed pipes, sound:

Low, surreptitious scratching.

Harlan presses his bulk to the wall, advancing steadily. For the first time in years he is tense. The blackness is absolute; he must guide himself along the wall like an earthworm, blind and moving on instinct. The heat is intense. His brow is soon slick with sweat. Something brushes his face, thin and filamented, perhaps cobwebs, or shredded insulation fibers; he recoils, clawing at whatever it is. Strands cling to his hand and he wipes them on his overalls. His foot collides with something in the darkness—something hard and quivering.

“Mother?” A man’s voice. “Mother, is that you?”

“No,” Harlan kneels. “It’s…a friend.”

“Mother,” the man mewls. “So hungry, mother.”

“Shshsh,” Harlan says. “Who are you?”

“Silly mother.” The man’s breath is a wave of stench. “Silly, silly mother.”

Harlan reaches out and places a hand on the man’s shoulder. Cold, clammy flesh tenses at his touch. “Don’t,” the man squeals. “Don’t h-huh-hurt me, moth—”

“It’s okay, okay,” Harlan says. His hand traces the curve of the man’s shoulder, down his upper arm…

“What the—?”

The skin under his fingers is mottled like melted candle wax. Continuing downwards, Harlan’s fingertips brush against what feels like smooth polished ivory…flesh-stripped bone. The other arm has also been stripped clean, shoulder to fingertips.

Harlan reaches lower. Blood pounds at his temples with the beat of a tom-tom drum. The flesh of the man’s legs has been stripped to the pelvis; his naked femurs clickety-clack like castanets on the cold concrete. The man is nothing more than a free-floating torso. His flesh has been methodically peeled away by someone, or something.

Rats?

No. Something else.

Mother.

“Who did this to you?”

“Silly, silly mother,” the man says. “Your children did, mother dear.” His voice rises to an off-key singsong: “You feed me and I feed you and that’s what makes the world go round. You feed me and I feed you and that’s what makes the world go round…”

How long has he been here? Harlan wonders. Down here in the dark, being picked apart?

“Did you come to feed me, mother?” the voice becomes sneaky-sly. “You feed me and I’ll feed the children. They love me, the children do. Love my taste.”

“What children?”

“Your children, silly mother,” says the armless, legless thing. “Your beautiful little children…but such appetites, oh my. Feed me and I’ll feed—”

“I didn’t come to feed you.”

“But I’m sooo hungry.” The man’s femurs beat a querulous rat-a-tat-tat on the floor. “Please, mother, please feed me.”

Starving to death in this sightless hole, limbs slowly stripped away, his only companions the engorged rats who skitter over his prone body…is it any wonder the man is insane?

“Just a little,” the thing says. “Just a little just a little just a little taste…”

“All right,” Harlan says, twining his hands around the man’s neck. “All right, now.”

“Do you still love me, mother?”

Harlan does not answer. Instead, he wrenches the man’s head sideways, shattering his neck. The man dies quickly; eagerly. His body slides down the wall, a cooling buffet for the vermin. Harlan continues into the blackness.

A pinprick of light somewhere ahead. The sounds are getting louder.

Harlan approaches cautiously, ear pressed to the wall, eyes squinting for movement. A pair of recessed track lights flicker on and off; the others have been smashed. The walls are pockmarked with manhole-sized caverns, inky and fathomless. They look like mole burrows, but far larger. The floor is covered with dark stains and mounds of foul-smelling pellets.

Is that…animal shit?

He peers inside one of the holes that honeycomb the walls. It is deep, the cement appearing to have been chipped away with a crude implement.

Looks like it was done with a sharp piece of metal…or…or claws.

He stares closer.

What the fuck—

A flash of pink flesh, creamy and smooth.

Babyish-looking, his mind whirls. It looked like baby ski—

“What are you doing here?”

Harlan spins on his heel, railing-bar raised. A form slouches in a darkened nook. Its body is shrouded in shadows. It shifts, seeking deeper shelter.

“There was an incident above,” Harlan says.

“You should leave.”

“Why?”

“Things are different down here,” it says simply.

The lights cut out and the hallway is thrown into momentary darkness. Noise—hesitant and scuttling, a sound like nails raking a chalkboard—coming from behind, above, all around.

Coming from the holes.

The lights flicker on.

“Who are you?” Harlan asks.

The form stirs, settles. “My name is Lazarus.”

“Lazarus Cranston?”

“Yes.”

“I remember hearing about you.” Harlan feels like a bush-league player meeting Joe DiMaggio. “You’re a…legend.”

“In all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons.” A pause. “Leave. Now.”

“There was a man back there,” Harlan points down the hall. “He was in bad shape.”

“I brought him down,” Lazarus says. “For…company. But I have other company now.”

“He’d gone crazy.”

“Everyone’s crazy. You, me, everybody. Crazy.”

“I killed him.”

“That’s all right. There’s always more.”

“More what?”

Lazarus shifts again. Dark shapes move in the shadows behind him. “More…meat.”

Just beyond the light’s feeble scope, someone moans pitifully. Harlan barely glimpses the outline of a figure in the murk. He steps towards it.

“Who’s that?”

“Another lost soul.”

The man is shackled to the wall, his wrists encircled by loops of barbed wire. A sound like fat raindrops splashing a puddle’s surface as a dark pool of blood collects below the hanging body.

Harlan lifts the man’s drooping head and slicks back the stinking mop of hair that has fallen over his face. The man’s milk-white features have been ravaged by sharp implements; razors or scalpels or perhaps broken glass. His nose has been halfway torn off and dangles on a strip of ligament just above a mouth whose lips have been ripped off or bitten away. The forehead has been stripped of all skin and muscle and the almost-perfect rectangle of exposed skull-bone shines in the darkness like a drive-in movie screen. Nearly every tooth, except for the canines and a few back molars, have been ripped from his gums, giving his lipless mouth the appearance of a neglected picket fence. Something has hacked the bone off the man’s chin and pulled something, perhaps his tongue, through the hole. His ears have been sliced off with surgical precision and short white sticks have been jammed deep into the eardrums; Harlan realizes, with dawning horror, they are the man’s finger bones. The toothless thing’s lips pooch out like a suckling babe, sucking at the dank air.

Harlan recognizes something in the rudiments of the man’s flayed-open features. He was one of the men he’d flown on the plane with, ridden the bus with, entered The Coliseum with. A regular, ordinary guy with a regular name, Hal or Sal or maybe Al...

The wall-holes are alive with hectic birth.

“Get…out,” Lazarus says.

Harlan stares at the space where Al’s legs once hung. Scattered rags of flesh, which had previously been Al’s attached limbs, have been strewn in a wide radius, anklebones and kneecaps and assorted knobs of cartilage forming a jumble of useless knickknack beneath what’s left of his body. Al’s splintered thigh bones protrude just below his hips like a pair of candles from a toddler’s birthday cake, weeping curdled marrow. The man’s nipples have been sliced off, with scissors or another sharp instrument, to reveal the corded sinew of his chest. A hole has been cut around his bellybutton, the flesh pulled away, and a six-inch loop of bowel drawn through the hole. Harlan watches, sickened, as weak contractions push half-digested food, or perhaps excrement, through Albert’s milky-white intestinal tract.

“Who…what…did this to you?”

Albert’s remaining eyelid flutters. He stares at Harlan—stares past him, at the network of holes that speck the walls. “Not…not trying…to escape,” he breathes. “Make…making…homes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Homes!” he screams, his mind unhinged like a sprung trap door. “Homes! Homes!”

“Whose hom—?”

“You should have gone.”

Lazarus has risen. His body, swaddled in a blue plastic tarp, utterly dwarfs Harlan’s. His skin is translucent and spiderweb veins track the dome of his bald skull. Harlan wraps both hands around his weapon, which once felt so menacing and now feels as impotent as a toothpick. His heart is on the verge of bursting from his chest.

Get out get out get the hell OUT—

“Do you know how it feels,” Lazarus says, “to bring something into this world? How it feels to create life from life?”

The wall-holes are now livid; questing limbs dart from each and every opening. Some are brachial, segmented, arachnid. Others are as corpulent and greasy as maggots. Still others are shingled with coruscating scales, their tapered appendages tipped with brittle black claws.

What the fuck are those things?

“We all want to think it is possible to control what we create, don’t we? But how many times have we lost control of the monster?” Lazarus staggers forward. Underneath the tarp, his body is horridly malformed. Things twitch and clench beneath the worn blue plastic and, from the wall-holes, other things begin to emerge. “The people who built this prison think they can control what goes on inside. But they can’t. Not anymore.”

Harlan tries to gauge the distance past Lazarus and down the hallway. How far? Five-hundred feet? Two-hundred?

“I knew there was something wrong with the first one,” Lazarus says. “I was so afraid of what I’d done that I killed it. The second one I had down here. It was a game. I was fascinated with the…things…I was capable of producing. It was magical…at first.”

Lazarus let the tarp fall.

“Dear Christ…”

Lazarus’s body is a wasteland. The albino flesh is networked with angry red fissures and ragged scar tissue mantling nearly every inch of exposed skin. His…her…its…chest is hung with bulbous Earth-mother teats, nipples nicked with shallow puncture-wounds dripping reddish milk. Thin strips of skin have been ripped from his face and shoulders to hang in curling tatters resembling peeling wallpaper, or dead birch bark. In other locations the damage smacks of frenzied aggression: Swaths of flesh have been torn—or more likely chewed—from his forearms and upper thighs, deep angry wounds revealing the stark gleam of bone. Only his strange fount, a lunatic mishmash of penis and vagina, is unmolested.

Lazarus turns away slightly, as if embarrassed by his nakedness; Harlan’s heart flatlines for a moment as he glimpses the intermittent white wink of Lazarus’ spine, neat circles of flesh removed around each vertebrae to create a bowed constellation of exposed bone traversing his back from hipbone to neckline.

Things were closing in, all around them, rank on rank, silent as death…

“They were once sated on my milk alone. But in time their tastes...matured. They have hurt me more times than I can remember.” Lazarus tries to smile. “But isn’t it natural for children to return love with scorn? And they will not let me leave. They love me too much for that.” His fingers stroke a bastard sex, matriarch and patriarch co-mingled. “They leave me alone…down here. It is instinctive; they treat it with reverence. But I’ve heard noises in the darkness.” The massive man-woman shudders. “They are reproducing themselves, I think.”

Harlan’s mind is stretched taut, a rubber band on the verge of snapping. To the left of him, or perhaps to the right, he heard a stealthy rustling sound, dry autumn leaves skating across an October sidewalk. “Just…just move out of the way and let me by. I won’t hurt you.”

Lazarus shakes his head sadly. “Don’t you see? It is you who will be hurt.”

The first one to emerge is perhaps three feet tall. Its head is black, sloped, smooth as polished obsidian. Compound eyes stare up at Harlan, betraying a massive hunger. Its fishbelly-white lips are spread to reveal scalpel-sharp teeth spiraling in ever-tightening circles. It lopes forward with a menacing simian gait, scabrous tongue testing the dank air.

Oh Jesus oh Jesus Christ what is that THING—

Others follow. One is completely bald, the tired flesh of its face pulled tight on an insectile skull so it shines with tension. There are stains of decay and disease on its skin, and in places the ropy muscle has withered to black pus, through which its strange bone structure glints nakedly. Drool black as polished ebony drips from it cruel maw to sizzle in stinking puddles on the floor.

The topmost portion of another one’s skull has been removed as one might remove the crown on a soft-boiled egg, the pinkish-gray walnut of its brain glistening in the shadows. Things—tiny and white and contentedly-squirming things—crawl amidst the runnels of its exposed mind, things Harlan wants to believe are maggots for the slim normalcy such a sight might afford, yet knows, instinctively, are not. The creature’s mouth spans half the circumference of its face and hangs wide open. Blue-black tubes spill from the maw, dark liquid pumping through their mucous-coated length. Harlan stares closer… and sees, with the minute eye for detail that only utter terror confers, that it is not liquid coursing through those dark tubes but rather tiny moving shapes, very alive, sentient, and purposeful; realizing, with awed revulsion, that the creature itself—its very insides—is composed of other, smaller creatures…

He steps back, mind yammering. His back hits the wall and a bony knob brushes his spine and he jerks away with a frantic yelp. He feels something bursting up inside of him, something insane and dark with colors.

They come. The newest arrivals inhabit the rough size and shape of spider monkeys, but all similarities to man or beast ends there. The texture of their flesh is red but shifting, dimming and brightening like embers in a gusting wind; and the skin of their bullet-shaped heads is stripped back in narrow ribbons that dance and circulate around their raw faces in the manner of streamers tied to an oscillating fan. A sea of eyes—some cyclopean, some slitted, others lidless, still others free-floating on red stalks in the manner of snails—appraise the shivering creature in their midst. The combined noise of their repulsive anatomies approximate, by turns, a poorly-tuned clock and a dying animal: Ticking, crackling, sobbing, whimpering, ratcheting…

Something terrible has happened down here, something has created these hideous mutations that could never have survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden their existence. But down here, far beneath the Coliseum’s dark dome, nature has taken on another ghastly face…

They continue to appear. The latest ones are horrendously fat, freakish travesties of healthy newborns: These crawl forward in the manner of grubs, hideously eager, the feeble clawing of their flipper-like arms aided by the peristaltic contractions of their horridly-distended abdomens. Harlan watches, breathless, as one of these grub-babies excretes something black and noxious-smelling and wriggling from its anus. The blob of shit shimmers fitfully on the cracked concrete and Harlan sees, or thinks he sees, tiny stunted appendages pushing themselves out of the dark mess, each dwarfish digit webbed with runners of slime…

And it slams into him, the wrecking-ball of complete understanding:

That isn’t an anus.

And that isn’t shit.

Something shatters then, deep in Harlan Ruddock’s head, and he starts to scream.

“Everyone has something to give the world,” Lazarus says, switching off the first of the two remaining track lights. As he moves to the next his children crawl, and scurry, and slither from their warrens. Harlan mouths no, no, no, no as they move towards him. They are so attracted to his fear, to his revulsion…but mostly to his soft, warm flesh.

Lazarus dims the other light. In the darkness, his voice seems terribly tired, terribly sad.

“But sometimes the world does not want what you have to offer.”

Harlan does not hear him. He is running. Running through the darkness.

He takes only a few steps before something attacks his legs above the cuffs of his boots with biting lunges. Then something else, light as a straw-doll but reckless, latches onto his kneecap and sinks a sharp appendage—a claw, or a stinger, or a fang—into the flesh of his upper thigh. Harlan reaches down blindly and grasps the creature in his hand, its bone structure like a whicker ball, its bones hollow and bird-like, and crushes it and feels it burst apart in his fist and then fluid is running between his fingers that burns horribly.

Adrenaline redlined, he misjudges the tunnel’s curve and slams headlong into the wall. His skull rings off the cinderblock and his blackened vision explodes with formations of tiny burning birds. He turns, swinging the railing bar crazily, hearing it smack into something with a sudden wet ripping noise before clanging off the wall. Then a warm flabby body is pressing itself into the crook of his armpit, biting. He swats at it with his right hand, screaming, and his fingers stray too close to something they shouldn’t have because every digit except his thumb is torn out with tremendous force and blood from the madly-jetting stumps plasters his face. Harlan crushes its squirming body against the wall; it bursts like a balloon filled with warm tar and then he’s running again, the railing bar lost somewhere behind with the whisk and patter of a thousand pursuing infants.

He’s nearly three-quarters of the way back when something leaps onto his backside. The sound of ripping canvas is followed by another, meatier ripping sound. Suddenly he feels much lighter, as if he’s lost several pounds in the span of seconds, and coldness is spreading in conical waves up his back and down his legs. On the heels of this comes pain, earth-shattering and fibrous, and he reaches back with his good hand and it passes unimpeded through the space where, only moments before, his buttocks had been. Harlan gropes, desperate and whimpering, eventually touching the wet bone of his hip-socket and, bizarrely, disturbingly, he can feel his femur rotating in this socket and a dim shockwave each time his foot pounds the cement. His boots are heavy with blood. His head is swimming and he hears bells ringing somewhere.

A huge whirring fills the darkness. Harlan turns as a solid flying shape smashes into his face, knocking him against the wall. Its body buzzes against his cheeks and a febrile proboscis injects into his left eye to vacuum the eyeball out in a convulsive flex. A tail, ringed and hairy as a rat’s, whips around his neck, cutting off his breath, and a pair of membranous wings flap noxious wind into his face.

Harlan makes a fist and smashes it into the writhing, biting body again and again. He is dimly aware that he is screaming, and that his screams are baffled by the greasy membrane of flesh covering his face. The body falls away and he stomps it under his feet. Things are running in a tidal flood around his calves, between his legs.

He breaks into a stumbling run, equilibrium totally shot, bouncing off one wall, turning, glancing off the other, a human pinball. Something is hanging persistently to his left side. He pushes at it with his fingerless hand, managing to shake it free. He touches the spot where it had been and feels a bulge protruding just below the ribcage, its surface tight as patent leather: his kidney, or what remains of it. Then another of Lazarus’s offspring hits him broadside, spinning him around in a drunken circle. It shimmies up to his head, squealing and slobbering, and rips away a section of Harlan’s scalp. He falls to one knee, then starts to crawl forward. His hands make wet slapping sounds against the concrete. His ears are filled with the gibber and screech of the things that pursue him.

Something tears his boots off. In the darkness all Harlan can feel is these small bodies pressing close. Something is eating his toes, or perhaps only biting them off, for the elemental pleasure the act affords. Harlan feels his body growing numb. His head floats somewhere above his body, seeking the light. He gives one last heave, stumbles over a skeletal body, and lies down. He starts to laugh, a keening, lunatic sound.

And maybe this is best. This careless insanity.

So Harlan Ruddock, the Beast of Fulgate, laughs into the darkness.

Until something clambers down his throat and begins to eat him inside-out.

««—»»

“They’re all dead, sir.”

“All of them?”

“Looks like it.”

The Master Guard can see bodies rotting in the third tier stands. Movement beneath the rigor-hardened torsos as rats feast on soft organs. The last turf war had dropped the prison population to seven inmates; this one was even more effective.

“Well I’ll be god-damned,” the Master Guard says. “You think they skunked the place?”

The young guard scratches his head. “Maybe a few buzzards still around, never know. Motion sensors detect movement in the basement.”

“Probably more rats. Joint’s lousy with them.”

“Probably.”

The Master Guard passes a hand through his brushcut. “You know what,” he says. “I say we go in there.”

“Sir?”

“Watch closely for the next couple of days, right? We’ll know who’s left when they come for the food. We storm in, shackle the few freaks left alive, remove them while we update the place—install new cameras and clear out some of the bodies, maybe plant some new toys for the boys to stick their sorry selves with.”

“The basement…”

“Hey, if there is anything down there, we lock and load, blow the sad-sack freaks a new asshole. You get?”

“Sure,” the guard says. “I get. Should we call in some guys from Fulgate?”

“Nah. We got what, eight guys? More than enough.”

Inside the prison, down in the basement, Lazarus Cranston and his offspring wait in the darkness. They are eager to meet and greet, make a few new friends.

Eager for a chance to see the wide, wide world.

“Yeah,” the Master Guard says. “Let’s do it.”

— | — | —

Patrick Lestewka is the pseudonym of Canadian writer Craig Davidson. The Preserve is his first book. He has a collection, Rust and Bone and a novel entitled The Fighter.